Kingory, NapWars, Evony, Empire Craft and Lords Online. Games Galore!
China is now seemingly an online games powerhouse. This country is pumping out more online games (of improving quality) than ever before. But recently a lot of the titles (while good) have been very, very similar to each other.
Take for example; Evony Free Forever. Everyone knows about this one, surely! With the amount of advertising all around the internet – it’s been in your face a lot of the time. It seems like a big success for the China game developers.
Now, the new online games titles coming up are: Kingory, Fog of War and Napoleonic War (NapWars). Also throw into the mix Lords Online the game.
While the basic setting and era for these games might be uncommon; there still remains a huge link between the interfaces, end-game and overall feel of the turn-based-strategies. (Another one that just came to mind is Empire Craft.)
Lets start with Kingory. This title looks to be a spoof of ReXueSanuo. Hard to pronounce I know, but it was a popular game in China and it seems Kingory is just the translated end-product for the rest of the world. (Most stuff between these two games are like for like apart from the language change)
Evony Free Forever hails from Guangzhou, China and is a product of the talented UMGE gaming group. This team is believed to be working on several new sequels. (Age of Evony II is the first)
Napwars comes from another China group calling themselves SOHO Union kicking things off out of Hong Kong then growing from there to now have in excess of a hundred employees. (Software Games Developers).
Another production line China online games release has been Lords Online. This browser RTS hails from IGG (IgotGames) who have several existing releases on the market. (Lords Online is yet another RTS clone sadly). This group seem to have plenty of capital, expect to see continued releases from them.
The success of Evony Free Forever continues to spur on copy-cat game groups in this sector – which is a good and bad thing for end-gamers. If the browser titles are free, then great and obviously the graphics will only get better. But copy-cat titles might flood and frustrate the market if everyone isn’t careful.
Lets look at the game “Empire Craft”. Again in the same mould as the others, you can however choose between three various race choices and you can ‘schedule’ various constructions to take place in this game. (Handy while AFK). (This gaming group have links to Oak Pacific Interactive in Beijing)
All told that’s five varieties of a similar game-format.
Guaranteed there are many more on the market we don’t know about, and plenty in the pipeline like Age of Evony II.
With the success of Evony Mark 1 – big payments to Google did pay dividends and got the signups they needed. A large initial outlay but worth it to secure a gaming market of several million.
Based on this; get set for this market to continue to heat up as the new internet money-spinning trend continues.
