Garena, Singapore Ocean Technology Media and Co’s Internet-gaming community platform, has gone from strength-to-strength since its launch in 2007. When we chatted with Garena’s founder, Forrest Li last year, they told us about the 23 million registered users. However, just shy of one year on, the number might now be 42 million users. According to Quantcast‘s estimate, in June 2010 Garena drew 13,000 unique visitors from the United States alone; Compete estimated 60,000 unique visitors worldwide for the same period.
Garena offers three main features that optimizes a gamer’s experience–
Reliability: Garena’s commitment to hack-free and virus-free gaming provides players with peace of mind to enjoy their gaming experience. Network optimization might not be the most flashy feature, but is certainly essential to ensuring that a multiplayer game, especially one connecting people across borders, can be enjoyed.
Variety: The platform caters to avid gamers by supporting a range of popular games–a player can play a real-time strategy game like Command and Conquer one week, and move on to a first-person shooter when the mood strikes.
Community: With between 400,000 to 450,000 gamers logged in to Garena at any one point in time, it’s important that there are active steps to encourage a sense of community. Some features that enable this include an instant-messaging system to enable players to find like-minded people to start a session with, a clan system for gamers to form more exclusive clubs, and a ladder system that shows off achievements, to motivate gamers.
Earlier in 2010, the former Director of MySpace Mobile joined the Garena team as their Chief Product Officer. Ulf Waschbusch’s focus is on extending Garena’s reach into more countries, as well as more feature areas. With Garena placed in the thick of fast-growing Asia, what can we expect from them next?
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