Rainbow sets up $25m studio

Rainbow sets up $25m studio
Free-to-play online game for pre-teens will be based on its Winx Club franchise
By Chua Hian HouSINGAPORE's video games industry has scored a coup, with Italian animation studio Rainbow putting $25 million in a new gaming unit here to create a virtual world based on its popular Winx Club fantasy franchise - the biggest investment in this sector here so far. Its Singapore studio, said Rainbow's chief exective officer Iginio Straffi at a media briefing on Monday, is expected to have about 100 full-time staff onboard by 2011. So far, Rainbow's studio at Smith Street has 12 staff, half of them Singaporeans. Its upcoming game is expected to have a 'multiplier effect' - it will also create jobs for another 200 people like external freelance artists, said Mr Straffi. Prior to this new venture, Rainbow, Italy's top animation company with some 60 million Euros in sales annually, had licensed video games companies like Eidos and Activision to create games based on its Winx Club license, an animated series featuring fairies and witches popular with pre-teens. Rainbow's Winx Club website has over two million registered users, including 100,000 from Singapore. The animated cartoons are shown on cable channels like the Cartoon Network. It has been planning to set up its own games unit for several years now, said Mr Straffi, and was eyeing a few possible sites in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. It finally picked Singapore for its good telecommunications infrastructure, strong intellectual property regime and government support. Having a Singaporean wife, Ms Joanne Lee, who is an executive vice president of the company, also helped in the choice. If all goes well, the firm will consider setting up an animation studio here to create animations for television and even the big screen, said Mr Straffi. The company has 185 full-time employees in two studios in Italy. The Winx Club online game is the fourth such game - known as MMOs or massively multiplayer online games in industry parlance - to be made in Singapore. In 2005, Japanese studio Koei invested about $3 million to develop its recently launched Romance of the Three Kingdoms MMO; Ksatria Gameworks and Real U are expected to release their MMos within the next few years, said Economic Development Board assistant managing director Manohar Khiatani. Rainbow, he said, 'is a valuable addition to our interactive digital media industry (and will) create exciting career opportunities for those gifted with creative flair and business acumen.'The presence of Rainbow, Mr Khiatani added, will also 'provide an essentiall avenue for us to nurture talent and push Singapore into the limelight in the field of animation and gaming.' The Government has identified the interative digital media industry, which includes areas like MMOs, as one of three key economic growth areas that will create 10,000 good-paying jobs by 2015. The World of Warcraft, the world's most popular MMO, with over 11 million players worldwide, was developed at a cost of US$60 million.For more information, please click here