Forget NBA 2K and FIFA. Jump Smash is the next sports big video game franchise out of Asia.

An Asian developer wanting to go head-to-head with the huge sports game franchises of FIFA and NBA 2K could be called ambitious. But what do you call an Asian developer who is already doing that?

A self-funded studio in Selangor, Malaysia, Mediasoft is just over two years old. Yet it has already created a sports game brand for itself. It is the developer of the realistic badminton mobile game, Jump Smash.

The first Jump Smash game debuted in 2013, garnering 1.5 million installs within the first two weeks of launch. Jump Smash had eight playable characters and three tournament venues. The court was navigated through touch-screen controls, while smashes and serves were dealt with on-screen swipes.

“We chose to develop a badminton game because of the fan base,” Havene Liew, managing director of Mediasoft, told us, adding that the game’s largest player bases were in China, followed by Malaysia and Indonesia respectively. “There’s a lack of this type of game in the market,” he added. Mediasoft had created about 40 casual games before it decided to go the more “serious” game route.

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As a freemium game, Jump Smash was monetized through advertisements and in-app purchases, and more interestingly, in-game sponsorship as well. Similar to real-world sports tournaments, Mediasoft allowed brand visuals in the game—for a fee. This, Liew revealed, is its biggest moneymaker, and allowed Mediasoft to focus more on IP creation.

In order to boost the Jump Smash brand even higher, Mediasoft took to on-ground events, hosting the “International Junior Championship” for actual badminton, as well as a virtual gaming tournament centred around the game. “This made Jump Smash more valuable,” Liew explained, citing it as a reason for sponsors being keen to come onboard.

Yet for all its success, Jump Smash didn’t have an easy start. After four months of developing an alpha prototype, the Mediasoft studio got broken into one night. “Everything got stolen, including all [our] 14 computers,” Liew shared. But the launch date remained; instead, Mediasoft rebuilt everything in three months.

June 2014 saw Jump Smash Legend being released. A more polished iteration of Jump Smash, Legend was also a larger game with more content. It had 32 player characters for Jump Smash’s eight, and boasted 12 tournaments, as well as plenty of cosmetic in-app purchases. However, it was essentially still the same game.

Liew said that the first Jump Smash had been used to test the market and do more audience surveys. The heftier Jump Smash Legend was the result of that research, and paved the way for Mediasoft’s true aim: to make an enduring realistic sports game series like the FIFA and NBA 2K games.