Red 5 Studios Inks Major Deal with Garena to Distrubute Firefall in Southeast Asia

via Red 5 Studios

Red 5 Studios — an American game developer owned by Chinese game publisher The9 — is making a free-to-play first-person-shooter game called Firefall. In South Korea (where The9 just opened a new branch) the company announced that it had signed a deal with Garena, a Singapore-based games publisher, to bring Firefall to southeast Asia.

Moreover, the $10 million deal set a record for a southeast Asian game distribution deal, eclipsing the record set earlier this year by Blizzard in their agreement with distributor Asiasoft to publish World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3. Comparing the deals on a per-game basis, Firefall brought in more than any of Blizzard’s titans, which is pretty impressive given that it hasn’t been released yet. But perhaps there’s something in their blood; many of the folks on the Red 5 team had previously worked for Blizzard on World of Warcraft, and clearly Garena was impressed by what they’ve seen of the game so far.

For the record, so am I. And Korea’s Gstar games conference gave the Red 5 guys an excuse to release another trailer, which I’ve embedded below. The game is a massively-multiplayer online shooter that looks like a fascinating mix of World of Warcraft, Team Fortress, Tribes, Halo, and cool glitchy electronica music (though that may just be in the trailers). The game’s in private beta right now, and we’ve asked to get in so we can check it out. It looks like the sort of thing that could take Asia by storm, and Red 5, The9, and Garena certainly know their markets well, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

[Via QQ Games]