IPVG, iGames team up for online gaming in RP

IPVG Corp., a leading Internet convergence company in the country, has signed an agreement with Singapore’s iGames Asia Pte. Ltd. to form a joint venture company to sell the latter’s products.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, IPVG said the agreement calls for the creation of a 70-30 joint venture company that would allow iGames to do business in the Philippines.

iGames is Southeast Asia’s fastest growing software distributor for interactive entertainment. Among its products include PC gaming titles from Vivendi Universal Games such as Warcraft and F.E.A.R.

The company is the exclusive distributor of VUG titles for Singapore and Malaysia in 2005 and covering most of Southeast Asia this year. It also publishes and operates massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) in Singapore and other parts of the region.

In Singapore, iGames is the exclusive distribution and marketing partner for Blizzard Entertainment’s record-breaking MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The company markets its range of titles through an extensive distribution network of retailers and cyber-cafes across Southeast Asia.

IPVG, on the other hand, was the result of the merger between MBf Inc. and IPVG Corp. (formerly Adobo Interactive Inc.). It was organized to provide Internet, extranet and other value-added services to any and all types of information technology users, with the objective of developing the IT sector in the country through the adoption and localizing of global Internet models.

IPVG owns three operating subsidiaries in information technology and telecommunications, online gaming, and business process outsourcing (BPO).

Its current partners include Fortune 1000 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange such as PCCW and IDT Corp.

IPVG owns IP Interactive, the first mover in the "free to play" and "item-based billing" online gaming space in the Philippines. IP Interactive is the exclusive publisher of Ran Online, Asia’s number one free-to-play MMORPG, which has dominated the key gaming markets of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia.

In Taiwan, Ran has generated more than 80,000 concurrent users.

IP Interactive also publishes O2Jam, the number one casual game in the world with more than 200,000 concurrent users in China alone, and Dreamville, a community portal that is the first to introduce an avatar-based model in the Philippines.