Altermyth studio wants to be “king in its own country”, starts Nampol platform

Altermyth has long been a pillar of game development in Indonesia. It’s also one of the country’s longest-running game studios, having worked with Indonesia’s largest telecommunications companies as well as Square Enix. But we didn’t get to preview any new games from it at Tokyo Game Show 2014. Rather, we found out that Altermyth is now working on its own game platform called Nampol, targeted at its domestic market.

Nampol, as we were told, is only about two-to-three months old, and is still working hard at gaining users. It presently has about 5,000 active users, 70 games for Android, eight browser games, and 33 Java games. All of these games can be obtained either via the pay-per-download scheme, or through its subscription model.

As befitting its target market, the monthly subscription to Nampol is not pricey at all. 24,000 IDR ($2) gets you access to all the games available on the platform, as well as loyalty rewards that can be exchanged for real-life goodies. In contrast, paying for games per download costs 500 IDR ($0.04) to 1000 ($0.08) IDR for Java games, and 3,000 ($0.25) IDR to 10,000 IDR ($0.83) for Android games.

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However, users don’t have to pay actual cash for the games. In a country with low credit card penetration like Indonesia, Nampol’s strongest selling point is its payment methods. Games on Nampol are bought with p-coins, with one p-coin worth 100 IDR. These p-coins can be obtained through SMS, Unipin, Mogplay, Gudang Voucher, and Mimopay topups—all domestic payment methods that don’t require credit cards.

But why do all this when your primary business is that of game development?

Altermyth’s business development officer Indra Yudistira, whom we met at Tokyo Game Show 2014, said that the studio found it difficult to get its games out into the global market. So it decided to look at its huge, captive domestic market instead. “We want to try to be king in our own country first,” Yudistira said.

Right now, Nampol isn’t about making money, nor is it a fast track to game dev superstardom. Yudistira and his team know that the platform’s clout depends on the number of users it has, and they are working towards that.

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Indonesian game developers can get their games onto the Nampol platform for free now. They don’t even have to agree to revenue share, and can use their own existing payment methods. This is due to the same reason mentioned above: Altermyth is focusing just on gaining users at the moment. But eventually, though, Yudistira said, Nampol will need its listed games to implement its payment methods.