A press release went out today on the wire announcing that
EA had signed an agreement with a Taiwanese company called GigaMedia to distribute
Warhammer Online in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. According to the terms of the agreement, GigaMedia will be responsible for the advertising, community management, customer service, and technical support for those areas. Doing some cursory research on the company on the 'net, it seems like GigaMedia has really cut their teeth on more casual game distribution efforts, their biggest property being
FunTown, the world's largest MahJong platform. They appear to be getting more serious about their game development and distribution efforts however, and initiated a relationship with EA last year by agreeing to release, of all games,
NBA Street Online.
What will really be interesting now that they've secured release efforts in the surrounding areas, is what approach EA will take to get
Warhammer Online introduced onto the Chinese mainland. A week ago today we reported on
a new policy of the Chinese government that would allow any domestic game publisher to effectively block the release of a foreign MMO by referring it to China's censorship board indefinitely. With that policy in place, are Chinese MMO companies going to allow the release of a game owned by one of the most prolific American game publishers in the world? You have to imagine EA is hard at work on it, given the size of the potential market there, but only time will tell.
