History of Online Gaming

Online gaming dates back to 1970, a first interactive game entitled “Advent” was created by
computer researchers. The game’s interface is in a text form with basic navigating command. The
location of the game took placed in online forest and the player had a complete control over the actions
of the character. From the game Advent, the concept of networked gaming emerged. The first
networked game was called Mazewar, where players are in the network and play by travelling through a
maze and attempt to kill each other (Barnes, 2003).

Market Trend of Online Games

A study conducted last December 2005 by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that
having exhibited tremendous growth since its inception in 2003, it is expected to reach 13 billion dollars
of total revenues for online games worldwide in 2011. Evolving to become a content-rich, highly
profitable, and community-based interactive activity, online gaming has enter number of sectors and
Services Providers (SP) from the Information and Communication Technology ecosystem to enter the
market in hopes of having their own share. Still, numerous of problematic issues such as poor service
quality, market saturation, government regulation and piracy which affects the industry’s performance.

The Asia/ Pacific online gaming market has been growing in a large sum in terms of games, and
trail blazing in the development of new business models, content and usage patterns. The gaming
market continues to be an attractive playing field for existing hard core online games. At the same, it
also appears to a new demographic of individuals who would never be considered as gamers, but have
adopted casual gaming with enthusiasm (www.idc.com, n.d.)

Expected acceleration of online gaming market growth is set in the coming years. In January
2003, the first commercial online game was released. Ragnarok Online, a game created by Gravity Korea
and was distributed locally by Level up Games Philippines, started the snowballing pf players connected
at a time. But the major influence has been driven by Massively Multiplayer Online Role- Playing Games
(MMORPG) (“Opportunities in…”, 2005).

MMORPG has dominated the gaming industry. MMORPGs are sprawling virtual worlds in which
players interact with other players by controlling one or more characters. They allow gamers to connect
and interact all over the world through the use of Internet. MMORPGs serves as a medium for gamers to
build a virtual community and self-expression into socially interactive virtual gaming adventure worlds,
which represents the next generation in digital entertainment in the Philippines.

Online gaming will remain the trend in the Philippine digital entertainment industry as it is
predicted to grow enormously because of its adaptation to the Philippine culture. Online games are
interactive, unpredictable, all-inclusive and will continue to evolve. Content providers allow the
Philippine Publishers to localize the games aa they can do an adaptation to Filipino preferences
(Opportunities in…”, 2005).