The video game industry is booming. In Asia Pacific, the sector raked in revenue worth US$71.4 billion in 2018, surpassing North America, which earned US$32.7 billion.
Andi Suryanto saw this potential and founded Jakarta-based Lyto in 2003, at a time when Indonesia had relatively few online game publishers.
Lyto’s first-mover advantage granted it a quasi-monopoly in the Indonesian gaming industry – an asset that was short-lived, as foreign game companies quickly entered the market in the late 2000s.
Despite this, the firm has managed to remain one of the country’s largest local gaming publishers, according to a 2017 Euromonitor study.
A key factor of Lyto’s success is its ability to keep pace with how the habits of gamers change.
“At the beginning of the company, we served online games for PC, but we [saw that] mobile phones and smartphones [were becoming] very popular, so we started actively launching games for smartphones as well,” Suryanto says.
The startup’s first online game would go on to win the Best Casual Mobile Game award in 2013 at a local video game exhibition. Such recognition cemented Lyto’s position as a prominent player in the space.
On top of expanding its range of products, Lyto is also working on broadening its reach beyond its home market.
“We’re based in Indonesia, but along the years, a lot of the games [became] very popular, and we wanted to expand to other countries,” says Suryanto.
Widening its reach, however, posed a challenge to the publisher. Because its titles were all online games, setting up in another country meant building large physical servers for data storage and network support, which could take up to several months.
To solve this issue, Lyto turned to cloud technology service provider Alibaba Cloud. The firm’s content delivery network and autoscaling services made it easier for Lyto to expand into other countries without having to manually restructure its existing systems. Now, the startup can set up online operations in a new territory in less than a day.
According to Suryanto, Lyto is also exploring opportunities beyond just developing and publishing online games.
“We have our payment gateway services, and we’ve gone into the movie industry as well,” he says. “Hopefully we can give other more entertainment to the people in the region.”
No comments:
Post a Comment