When Noumena started its operation, it focused on single-player games for high-end devices. Today, the cornerstone of the company’s offering is the Magic Game Station (MGS), a platform for feature-rich, on-line, multi-player gaming.

Noumena’s CEO Zeus Chen says: “In 2005, we launched our first online gaming platform under the MSG brand. And in 2008, we commercially launched MGS 3.0 in China, and are currently pushing it out across Asia.”

There are currently 13 online games being offered on the MGS platform. “In Asia, our games serve over 1.2 million users, which demonstrates our ability to support projects of scale,” Chen says. 

Noumena seeks to be “tech neutral”, Chen explains, and able to work with all infrastructure technologies: “We chose to go for IMS early on, because we saw it as one of the future technologies operators were likely to deploy.”

IMS offers lots of benefits for the operators, Chen says: “Compared to the ad hoc approach that is common today, IMS gives operators much more control over their services portfolio, in terms of what services they offer, how to make them work together, how to charge for them, and so on.

“And as IMS matures and penetrates deeper into the market, we will continue to look at what IMS features we can leverage on to enhance the gaming experience for our users.”

Noumena’s relationship with Ericsson goes back to 2006 and Chen is more than pleased. “Ericsson is one of the leading players in this market, and allows smaller and midsize players, such as us, to reach much more customers than we would do on our own,” he says. “Additionally, by working with Ericsson, we gain valuable insight in to what operators need, so we can improve our offering to meet their requirements.”

Noumena plans to add more games to its portfolio, focusing on massive, real-time, 3D, multi-player games, and, going beyond pure gaming, offering social networking features such as text messaging, push-to-talk, voice messaging, and cross-boarder functionality.

“In our road map, we also have support for more types of handsets, such as the iPhone and the gPhone,” Chen says. “And at some point later this year, we plan to launch an SDK for third party development of games for our platform.”

By Benny Ritzén

Noumena
IMS
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