Piracy Gives Birth to a New MMO, Bounty Hounds Online

During the Gstar 2009 video game trade show in Busan, Korea, XPEC Entertainment was approached by Gamasutra and eventually told it that it planned to release a new scfi-fi MMO. Bounty Hounds Online is inspired by the previous installment of the series, the single-player version, Bounty Hounds for the PlayStation Portable. Responsible for this evolution of the game, as weird as it sounds, is piracy. The PSP title was never officially released in China, but that didn't meant that it wasn't part of the local community. On the contrary.

XPEC Chairman Aaron Hsu stated that, "In 2006 the game went to market on the PSP platform. Although it didn’t get released in mainland China officially, it was illegally downloaded more than 2 million times through the illegal download sites. So we figured we didn’t get a single penny from the China market, but the title has a lot of potential users, clearly." Well, if anything, that right there is excellent marketing thinking. Instead of complaining about how your company lost two million potential customers to piracy, it saw the illegal downloaders as a potential upcoming distribution market. As it turns out, when life gives you pirates, make an MMO. Go figure.

The original game was a bold concept, a collaboration with Namco, a first overseas investment for the company and the publisher even sent a producer to work with it for 18 month. After two years spent carefully planning and analyzing the market, XPEX teamed up with what is now Namco Bandai and decided to take the game on a massively multiplayer online road trip.

"We decided to make Bounty Hounds Online," Hsu explained, "to use the MMO PC RPG platform to get money from that market. Out of those 2 million illegal download users, if 1% converts to the MMORPG in mainland China, then the game will be financially successful. It’s our form of anti-piracy." And it's a near perfect way to deal with piracy indeed. The game will be free-to-play, micro-transaction-based and is set to be released in Asia in 2010, where "we have those many illegal downloaders to act as our product base," Hsu said. A Western release isn't planned yet, but he does hope to bring the game over from Asia.