Yes that’s right, the right term here is that we, B2G invaded the PH office of Garena, one of the newest game publishers to enter the PH gaming scene. Currently, Garena is famous locally for providing online matches for Warcraft III custom game Defense of the Ancients (DotA). However the company is extending and hence has published certain titles for the PH gaming public.
We got the chance to talk to their Community Manager, Benj Dalmacio and Product Manager Mikey Buencamino to talk about their games and most specifically the future of League of Legends, their latest Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game that has recently switched to OBT phase.
Garena has currently three published titles which you can see on the Garena Messenger. For the PH, they have Go Kart, a fully-customizable casual racing game, Heroes of Newerth (HoN) another DotA type of game and League of Legends (LoL) the MOBA title of Riot Games. The PH branch of Garena also manages the release of Garena cards which provides “perks” in the Garena client such as changes in font color and certain room access perks that you can’t normally get as a free user.
Currently, Garena is providing Gold Membership privileges for their titles. For Go kart you have the VIP perks such as discounts in the item shop and added in-game currency earned. For the DotA client the Gold Membership provides fast room access and colored chat in the rooms. However they have yet to mention what is available for HoN and LoL since both of them are not yet on the commercial phase as of this posting.
Garena PH is also handling the Garena CyberCafe Alliance (GCA). This is an i-cafe progam by Garena that provides shops “Gold Membership” PCs for patrons of i-cafe. With a monthly fee, these computers could provide Gold Membership for Garena users without them paying for it. As long as they are using the PC with that was registered under the GCA, they have all the perks of the Gold Membership status.
Since I was a current League of Legends player, I asked about the current status of the game in the country. I also asked why is it that the version of the game is pretty far from the NA or EU ver. of the game and I asked if they would also follow the way Riot Games is releasing the patches.
Mikey Buencamino answers this question by stating the diff. of the Business model of the Philippines compared to NA or EU. “Here in the Philippines, there are more people who play our games on shops rather than in their own homes” He explains. “So we had to adjust our business model to accommodate the I-cafe industry where most of our players are,” He continues. “We have to make the patches small so that it won’t be a problem for i-cafe owners whenever we release them. Of course we expect that one computer doesn’t just have our games and patching can really be a problems specially for bigger i-cafes, so to help ease the burden for the owners we are trying our best to make the LoL patches as small as we can while trying to get to where the NA and EU are now.”
This explains also their focus on the GCA since most of the players are on i-cafes the Garena PH team wants to provide the best gaming experience as best as possible.
Aside from delivering the best experience in their games, I was told that Garena PH is being strict in their forum policy and how they handle the interaction of players in their forums.
In proving this point, Buencamino shares “as the userbase expands, so will the staff”. So in line with this I inquired if they will also follow the Tribunal system that was supposed to be implemented in the NA servers of LoL.
Buencamino answers this with “In the Philippine setting, we are used to having GMs, CMs and forum mods policing the forums so we expect them to handle cases that the Tribunal is supposed to cover. Though, this doesn’t mean that we will ignore it, in fact we are thinking about it. We haven’t reached to a decision yet, but we are thinking about it.”
We were also told that they will be releasing other MMOs in the future, however what they are is still uncertain. However, I was assured that they will be releasing games that are top dollar (or peso) since they have set a high standard for themselves and that they want to maintain the high image that the Garena title has set.
With the Q & A said and done, me and Billy were given a tour of their office. I must say that the Garena office is puh-ri-ty. As seen in the gallery below, I was pretty envious since my office (before and right now) isn’t as…. beautiful looking as theirs. We were toured by Benj, I had this slight tinge of envy as I looked around more and seeing that the place was customized for Garena itself with the company’s colors almost plastered in certain areas such as a rec room and the 2 meeting areas they have. It had such a light atmosphere that seemed to lack my old office.
After all that was done we bid our goodbyes, we will be returning to their office in the near future for the series I’m working on. Since the company is growing you may want to join in their ranks and be part of the Garena staff. But that’d be another post for another day.
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are you planing to make garena stadium there?
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