17 January 2007
Wazap!, one of Japan's biggest video gaming portals, has announced that it has raised $7.9 million in order to launch its service in the US this February. Wazap! is a search engine that focuses solely on video games; it amalgamates link to websites, screenshots, cheats, news, reviews and more based on the particular game for which the user has searched. Price comparison, which is another feature on the site, can also be used by gamers to find the best place to buy a particular game.
The future looks bright for Wazap!: 11 million unique visitors currently frequent the site and have racked up 200 million page views in the space of one month. Figures released by the company indicate that over $1 million in revenue was generated by the site in the last year alone. Furthermore, Wazap! was recently launched in China, and UK expansion is anticipated soon after the US launch.
But Wazap! may find that the fight on the video game portal battlefield will be a hard one to win. Long established gaming sites like IGN and Gamestop have almost encyclopaedic databases of game related media, composed from their own archives. Moreover, popular video game blogs such as Kotaku, Destructoid and 1UP can now hold almost as much sway in the video gaming world as their older brethren.
A major competitor to Wazap! will be GameRankings.com, a site which offers very similar services to the Japanese game search engine. GameRankings.com is driven by a Web 2.0 ethic in which users vote on the quality of articles that have been amalgamated. Wazap! also has some way to go when it comes to searching for older, less-current games. A search for reviews of the game 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time' - released nine years ago - on Game Rankings gives users access to a massive pool of 45 reviews. Conversely, if a user makes the same search on Wazap!, no reviews are listed.
Video games are currently big business all over the world - and with the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 joining the Microsoft Xbox 360 in the United States last November, the gaming climate has become very competitive.
Additionally, PC gaming is on the up-turn. Blizzard, the company behind massively multiplayer online (MMO) game 'World of Warcraft', announced earlier this week that subscriptions to the service had reached the eight million mark. Yesterday also saw the launch of the World of Warcraft expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. The event had gamers queuing for over 24 hours in order to secure a copy of the update, creating crowd scenes that would normally only occur on a console launch day.
Wazap! game search to launch in United States
Wazap!, one of Japan's biggest video gaming portals, has announced that it has raised $7.9 million in order to launch its service in the US this February. Wazap! is a search engine that focuses solely on video games; it amalgamates link to websites, screenshots, cheats, news, reviews and more based on the particular game for which the user has searched. Price comparison, which is another feature on the site, can also be used by gamers to find the best place to buy a particular game.The future looks bright for Wazap!: 11 million unique visitors currently frequent the site and have racked up 200 million page views in the space of one month. Figures released by the company indicate that over $1 million in revenue was generated by the site in the last year alone. Furthermore, Wazap! was recently launched in China, and UK expansion is anticipated soon after the US launch.
But Wazap! may find that the fight on the video game portal battlefield will be a hard one to win. Long established gaming sites like IGN and Gamestop have almost encyclopaedic databases of game related media, composed from their own archives. Moreover, popular video game blogs such as Kotaku, Destructoid and 1UP can now hold almost as much sway in the video gaming world as their older brethren.
A major competitor to Wazap! will be GameRankings.com, a site which offers very similar services to the Japanese game search engine. GameRankings.com is driven by a Web 2.0 ethic in which users vote on the quality of articles that have been amalgamated. Wazap! also has some way to go when it comes to searching for older, less-current games. A search for reviews of the game 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time' - released nine years ago - on Game Rankings gives users access to a massive pool of 45 reviews. Conversely, if a user makes the same search on Wazap!, no reviews are listed.
Video games are currently big business all over the world - and with the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 joining the Microsoft Xbox 360 in the United States last November, the gaming climate has become very competitive.
Additionally, PC gaming is on the up-turn. Blizzard, the company behind massively multiplayer online (MMO) game 'World of Warcraft', announced earlier this week that subscriptions to the service had reached the eight million mark. Yesterday also saw the launch of the World of Warcraft expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. The event had gamers queuing for over 24 hours in order to secure a copy of the update, creating crowd scenes that would normally only occur on a console launch day.
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