Neowiz Games
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Online games |
| Founded | April 26, 2007 |
|
Key people
|
Sang-Youb Lee (CEO) |
| Products |
Alliance of Valiant Arms S4 League Pmang.com - Game Portal CrossFire Puzzle Bobble Online |
|
Number of employees
|
470 |
| Parent | Neowiz |
| Divisions |
Pentavision Neowiz Games Studio (formerly Thingsoft) |
| Website | Neowizgames.com |
Neowiz Games (Korean: 네오위즈게임즈) is an online game publisher in South Korea, with its own game portal, Pmang, publishing and servicing 41 diverse games of various genres, from sport to web board games.
Neowiz Games possesses two in-house development studios, Neowiz Games Studio and Pentavision. The former jointly developed EA Sports FIFA online with Electronic Arts and the latter introduced Neowiz Games to the PSP platform with their title "DJMax portable".
Neowiz launched Pmang rather late compared to other leading game companies in Korea, such as NCSoft or Nexon. That was in August 2003, and in November the same year, the number of visitors was significant. The first game serviced was Special Force, for which the beta test began in February 2004. In 2006, it had a 12 percent market share with 11 million registered users.
In June 2004, the company started the beta test of the school action adventure game “Yogurting”, which in December was exported to the Japanese ‘Gungho Entertainment’.
The following year, Neowiz entered into strategic partnership with over eight studios, including Thingsoft, which later developed Warlord and Perfect KO, and Pentavision, developer of Duel Gate and S4 League. Both later became Neowiz Games' own development studios. Thingsoft left Neowiz Games in 2010 to become an independent online game development studio.
In January 2006, Neowiz announced its entry into the Japanese game market and in February, it contracted with EA for the co-development and publishing of online games, thus marking the start of its international expansion.
In 2007, Neowiz Games separated from Neowiz Corporation and became another entity, along with four other subsidiaries of Neowiz.
Neowiz Games has also run the Magic Tree program since January 2008 as part of a corporate social responsibility program.
Neowiz Games China was established in September 2007 and is located in Shanghai. Close to 20 people, Korean and Chinese, are employed in business development and online game development, mainly in graphic and design work. In Japan, Neowiz Games took over iFactory, a Japanese internet service company, in May 2003. Neowiz Japan launched Sayclub Japanto provide chat and individual ‘mini-homepages’ and blogs. In 2006, Neowiz Japan began providing online game services, with a music rhythm action game R2Beat. In 2007, Neowiz Games and Game On, an online game company among the top three in Japan, became partners. In 2008 Neowiz Games began to operate its business through Game On. A branch office was opened in 2008 in the Silicon Valley of the USA to service online/web based games directly to the US market, and to oversee the development business of Hidden Path Entertainment (HPE), a Bellevue, WA based developer and a partner of Neowiz Games.
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