This past week we spoke to Mark Hill over at Perfect World about their new ARC game platform. As many companies are now harnessing the power of their large communities, Perfect World is hosting their series of games on a single platform for users. Mark gave us some details on the new ARC platform and how players will be able to access games much faster and explore Perfect World’s free to play market in a quick and easy way.
The Arc client, launched in May, creates a single environment for gamers to log into all of Perfect World’s titles. Games like Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and their newest offering, Swordsman, are all featured on the client.
"Swordsman marks the start of new and original content coming to Arc, where brand new games will be released for the first time on our platform. Soon, we will have more new content to announce--games we chose just for our audience." - Mark Hill
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Perfect World hosts up to fourteen games and with Arc will have all of their players in one central area. This system opens up better communication with their community. Players will also have a much faster load time and a more consistent experience. The download screen also allows Perfect World to show updates and offers for their other titles and keeps their top news on a rotator as a to service their fans.
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Arc has a pre-patching technology to get players into their games without the long wait. Mark wants to make sure that Perfect World’s 32 million users across all continents have a simple experience when logging in to play a game or to just browse titles.
The platform is also open to partners hosting, including Grinding Gears' Path of Exile and APB Reloaded. The company is looking for more partners to share in Arc and get their games out to Perfect World’s large community. The company has seen a positive response from its veteran players about the tool and hope to work with them on making Arc even better for users.
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As we see more games come to market it begins to make more sense that publishers and studios start to form these portals for players. If you play any of the Perfect World titles, Arc makes sense to use and will make life easier. The real challenge for companies is finding partners who offer games and share the plans on an equal level. This is not something players really have to worry about, it is more on the business side of things. Ultimately, systems like the Arc will become more common for large communities of players centered around one company. Hosting a lot of free to play MMOs has always been Perfect World’s specialty and the Arc does add value by combining everything.
Garrett Fuller / Garrett is the Industry Relations Manager for MMORPG.com. He cosplays as an orc, plays X-Wing on weekends, and loves Adventure Time. You can follow him on Twitter (when he uses it) @Gfulls.
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