An IT congress was held by Turkish IT Foundation in Ankara late November, and during the congress a special section was assigned for online gaming. During this very special section, which contained workshops and match-makes comparing foreign companies and domestic ones, we had the chance to interview with some of the foreign online game producers and marketers visiting our country. One of them was Ralph Frefat who is the Director of Business Development at Gamigo AG, a wholly-owned gaming subsidiary of Axel Springer AG. Axel Springer AG is one of Europe’s leading newspaper publishers and Germany’s largest. You can find the video (at the bottom) and the transcript of our interview with Mr. Frefat below:
Turk Internet: Mr. Frefat, why are you here in this gaming event? What kind of activities do you want to organize here?
Ralph Frefat: Well we are one of the biggest publishers of free to play MMOG’s and we are looking for distribution partners, payment partners and other media partners so we are entering to Turkish market within the next two months with a first fully localized game and we need to have support from a lot of companies as well. That’s why I am here.
Turk Internet: Did you find any useful contacts for you and what kind of contacts they are?
Ralph Frefat: Yes, definitely. It was a very good event. Payment partners, and we have distribution partners for gaming affairs and we also found some media partners in the TV and online market.
Turk Internet: I see. What kind of games are you publishing?
Ralph Frefat: We are publishing a variety of games that you can download as a client and install and the quality of these games are same as the ones you can buy at the stores. And it reaches from fantasy role playing games to sports, racing up to war games. So it’s a broadest portfolio.
Turk Internet: Could you give me a few names?
Ralph Frefat: The biggest name for sure is The Last Chaos. This is one of the biggest role playing games in Europe. This is a game that is localized in Turkish language already and will enter the market here in December or January. Other games are Fiesta, which is an extraordinary game with 40% female audiences, and Level R, which is the biggest racing community, and Shot Online which is the biggest golf community in gaming.
Turk Internet: Dou you have any mobile games in your portfolio?
Ralph Frefat: At the moment we don’t have any mobile games but we are thinking about it as we are setting up our own production team. Mainly we are thinking about iPhone developments.
Turk Internet: What are you thinking about Turkish gaming market?
Ralph Frefat: To be honest it’s a completely different market from all the other countries.
Turk Internet: Why is that?
Ralph Frefat: Because the test is different, the distribution is different, the payment is different. So it is not easy to copy a business model from Germany or France to here. But we are pretty confident to match this here now after getting all the information from this event.
Turk Internet: What is the difference here? You said for example the distribution is different. How is it done in Germany and France, and what is different here?
Ralph Frefat: The penetration of high quality PC’s is high in Germany. You have broadband everywhere so it doesn’t matter that if you have a 2 Gigabyte client to download but in Turkey you already have a limitation. And the distribution of games is extremely important here via Internet cafes. In all the other countries you more or less nearly don’t have any Internet cafes. People play at home and not in Internet cafes. But in Turkey it is different.
Turk Internet: Thank you.
Find Turkish translation of this text by clicking here
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