Hungary, Budapest, 21., April, 2005. – We might think that Everquest or World of Warcraft are the most popular online games. Well, they could be in their category, but the much simpler flash or java based internet games attract millions of secretaries and managers in order to utilize their empty minutes for throwing penguins, or playing online Snooker. Online Snooker, as during the first four days of the Snooker World Championship in Sheffield 98 600 players have registered on the www.flyordie.com website, in order to play one of the best online Snooker game. Thus the Hungarian game developer has recorded the 4 millionth registration recently. A significant part of the new players have come from the Eurosport sports portal, where the direct links of the game are available. The collaboration of Eurosport and FlyOrDie has started many years ago, the sports channel has chosen to publish the game mainly in order to popularise their snooker coverage.
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"It has been very essential for Eurosport to emphasize the dynamism of the channel on the Internet as well. That is why we decided - in accordance with the frequent snooker coverage and especially the World Championships – to publish the 3D Snooker game developed by Solware on Eurosport.com. Being one of the most chiselled online snooker game, it brings the feeling of the coverage even closer to our audience. After ca. 3 years of collaboration with Solware, we can conclude that the games can attract those players to watch the live Snooker action in television as well, who have visited the website looking for something else."- said Laurent Gayout of Eurosport.com |
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Gaming Business
Solware Ltd. of Hungary started developing java based online games in the year 2000. Their first title was 3D Billiards that – as the only real 3d online billiard game of its time – proved to be a peculiarity. „Our pool and snooker games are still amongst the best ones, thanks to the continuous upgrades for 5 years. Several other 3d billiard programs have appeared in the meantime, however we managed to hold our position due to the realistic physical simulation we applied. We were very proud when our efforts were acknowledged by the European Multimedia Associations Convention by awarding us the European Seal of Excellence in Multimedia prize. It was a great experience to shake hands with, and receive the prize from Mr. Kálmán Kovács, Minister of Informatics and Communications.” - stated Jozsef Hontvari, managing director of Solware.
Though we are facing a Hungarian enterprise and the Hungarian version of the website is also available amongst the other 45 languages – including Zulu, Uzbek or Vietnamese – we can hardly find any Hungarian players. „25% of our players come from the US, another 25% from the UK, the remaining 50% from all over the world, the Hungarian players are in minority.” – according to Mr. Hontvari. He revealed that this international reputation was based on the early collaboration with RealNetworks, one of the best known internet multimedia portals. „The fact that our games had been published on the www.real.com portal brought us good reputation in a small time. I have to add that it was not easy at all for a small company of a small country to get in contact with someone as big as Real.com. It took enormous efforts just to get a phone conversation with one of their associates.” - confessed the director.
What next?
„We are proud of our success, as we also have had hard times in the past 4 years. We were affected by the dotcom slump as well, and after 2 hard years we could finally make some profit last year.” - declared Mr Hontvari. Solware has amongst its future plans to collaborate with Hungarian portals as well. Solware has also been involved with two classic, highly popular games. We can all remember the first one from our childhood: everyone over 25 has
played Boulder Dash(R) from First Star Software on the C64. With the development of Boulder Dash(R)-Treasure Pleasure(TM) gamers can relive the adventure as they hunt for treasure while avoiding falling boulders and escaping from enemy creatures at www.flyordie.com.
Besides Boulder Dash, Solware bought the rights for the English version of the popular Hungarian adventure game: Larkinor. This role-playing game takes place in medieval environment, full of wizards and monsters. The game has brought attention mainly through its verbal creativity and its unique humour. As the Hungarian version of the game has helped to build a player community, we can expect that the Brazilians, Americans and British will soon follow the Hungarians for a Siamese Zombie hunt.
Relevant links:
Games at FlyOrDie.com webiste www.flyordie.com
Snooker at Eurosport www.eurosport.com/snooker
Official site of Solware www.solware.com
Screenshots and illustrations: http://www.flyordie.com/pub/pr/Solware_kepek.zip
About Solware
Solware was established in 1998, in Budapest, Hungary, its core activity being software design and development. From the very beginning the company has undertaken projects for the Dutch market developing unique softwares, later collaborated with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in developing intelligent systems. Solware took up a new line of business in 2000 with the main focus on java-based Internet games. This activity soon brought reputation for the company through international partnerships (Real, Eurosport, RTL). The games are currently known to more than 4 million players worldwide, mainly from the US, UK and Brazil. In 2001 Solware established the FlyOrDie label, under which its game portfolio is still being published, including but not limited to simple puzzles as well as the most complex 3D simulation sofwares. The company has built an international advertising network by 2005, with currently more than 150 million banners shown monthly on the game pages. Meanwhile the development of complex e-commerce, and Internet based solutions for large and medium size businesses still continues.
Additional information
Daniel Feher, Business development
Solware Informatikai Kft.
1214 Budapest, Szabadság u. 51.
www.solware.com
Fax: +36-1-4270236
Mail:
Andras Szell, managing director
Sakkom Interactive pr communication agency
E-mail:
Phone: +36-20-9738-563
www.sakkom.hu