Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 11, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
“With Chrome, Google has raised the bar another notch,” says Klaas Kersting, CEO of Gameforge, the world’s largest developer of browser games. “The other browser providers will try to catch up as quickly as possible, and that kind of market development can only benefit us.” More than many other sectors, browser-game developers benefit from new technologies from Microsoft, Google and others. Gameforge expects client downloads to become unnecessary within a few years, with online games played entirely in the browser. Chrome will therefore provide important momentum for the games market in any case.
With average annual growth of 350 percent, Gameforge and its more than 160 employees are at the forefront of the young browser-game movement. In April 2008 alone, around 272 million visitors spent almost 3.5 billion minutes on Gameforge sites. Gameforge gains approximately 250,000 new players every day, placing it far ahead of every competing company.
To play Gameforge’s free browser games, users need only a web browser and internet access before they can enter the virtual game worlds. Game processing takes place on the provider’s servers, so nothing needs to be installed on the hard drive and the game can be accessed from any computer.
Gameforge offers more than twelve games. New records are set regularly: Ikariam, Gladiatus and Legend Online each surpassed the one-million-user mark after only two months.
