Who are they?
Founded in 2006, Aeria Games has rapidly shot to fame as the leading destination for free-to-play online multiplayer games. The company prides itself on having a proprietary technology that offers strong benefits to both players and developers, making the gaming website such a popular location on the internet. Players gain access to a universal gaming destination providing deep, immersive online games accessible from PC, browser, tablet, and even from their smart phones. On the hand, developers get a very fast point of entry to the global gaming market via Aeria Games’ specialized platform that enables quick and easy game integration.

Although it currently has offices in the US, Germany, and Brazil, its headquarters is situated in the Mediaspree of Berlin, a trendy, upcoming district, where prominent telecommunication and media companies like MTV and Universal Music have their offices along the banks of the river Spree. Furthermore, with their relentless effort in improving their working culture, it is not surprising that this company is growing at a tremendous rate!

Aeria Games has come an impressively long way since its inception almost a decade ago and the company’s growing portfolio of games is a testament to its achievements! The company’s diverse portfolio includes highly engaging fantasy MMORPGs, action shooters, anime-style social games, multiplayer mobile titles and even mini casual games. They have also worked with renowned companies like Marvel to publish their Android mobile game, X-Men: Battle of the Atom just last year. Their games have been published in nine languages, namely English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Turkish and Russian, which covers more than 30 countries.

In addition, the game boasts of having a growing community of over hundreds of million players with them hitting the 50 million mark in 2012. That number has followed and is still following an upwards trend and it is no surprise if they have reached hundreds of millions of players by now. What’s special about this company that has contributed to its rapid rise to fame? Let’s check out their reservoir of games to find out!

What do they do?
Aeria Games have published more than 34 games and that number does not include the various mini-games it has published. Most of them are MMOs, namely MMORPGs, MMORTS games and MMOFPS games that include both browser-based and downloaded ones. Quite a large majority of their games are anime-inspired games which are localized from their Korean counterparts. This includes popular titles, such as Ragnarok Online 2 whereby players can once again experience the immersive and beautiful world of Midgard, Elsword, in which the similarly titled manga was brought to radiant life, and Aura Kingdom, which allows you and your fellow heroes ot brave an enchanting and unfamiliar world—to explore its wonders, and to protect it from the forces that would see it destroyed.

Besides anime-based games, Aeria Games also publishes fantasy-based MMOs, such as Age of Conan: Unchained which is, needless to say, an MMO developed based on the popular Conan the Barbarian universe, Drakensang Online, a semi-open world MMORPG that mimics Diablo 2 in some ways which is based on the popular German game series of the same name (minus the “online”), Scarlet Blade, whereby you are mankind’s last hope for survival by being a part of an elite team of genetically engineered humans, as well as many others!

Moreover, Aeria Games publishes MMORTS games that allow you to live the life of a medieval lord (virtually) like Stronghold Kingdoms, or be the leader of one of the four legendary civilizations – Rome, Egypt, Persia and China in Ministry of War. It also caters to fans of action games or MMOs in its community, by providing hit games, such as Kingsroad, Pirate Galaxy and the adorable Spiral Knights. The game even has a MOBA under its belt – Prime World!

Their best and most popular games, however, is likely to be their range of MMOFPS games, including popular titles like Soldier Front 2, Alliance of Valiant Arms (AVA) and also Wolf Team. Aeria Games actively promotes eSport competitions for players playing these games, with the winners having a shot at fame by competing in a global tournament. Admittedly, the prize money may not be as hefty as other tournaments, particularly MOBA tournaments.

Being a major publisher of free-to-play games, Aeria Games has its sights put on the rapidly expanding mobile market like any other game publishing company like R2 Games, Ubisoft and EA Games. Aeria Games began publishing mobile games, such as Immortalis, a MMOCCG game, as well as the highly-publicized app from Marvel, X-Men: Battle of the Atom.

All of these successes that Aeria Games enjoy beget the question – how did they do it? Well, in my opinion, Aeria Games has a great eye for games. Being a publisher doesn’t mean you’ll have to publish every game that comes your way. You’ll have to carefully select the few suitable ones (suitable for your loyal player base, that is) from the masses in addition to the cost and how much the developers are willing to pay. Being a publisher, you will also need to consider which localization would be suitable for your players as the cost of translating an entire game into another language is not exactly cheap. For instance, if a MMOFPS game will work well in, for instance, Russia, then Aeria Games will commission translators to do the work and their Russian players will be extremely grateful to have a game in their native language!

Furthermore, if you’ve tried any of their games before, it can be truly hard to stop once you’ve started playing their games... not at least after hours of real life time has passed. This is another factor that Aeria Games excel at – publishing games that are addictive and engaging. Not to mention, besides providing quality games, Aeria Games also provide variety! Just take a look at the various types of games I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraphs – they practically cover every MMO genre under the roof and they don’t even stop there... they proceed to expand into the casual gaming genre as well! It is almost impossible for huge fans of MMOs to not have registered for one of Aeria Games’ many MMO games at least once in their lifetime!

What does the future hold?
Aeria Games has big plans for the future and one of the most anticipated one is their upcoming anime-inspired MMORPG, Echo of Souls that will be localized (the game was originally Korean) and released for the global/ North American and European community. Aeria Games has announced that the open beta for Echo of Souls will be fixed on the 28th of May 2015, with the official launch date coming not too late after.

If you’re interested to check out the list of games that Aeria Games has published over the years, you can take a look at our Aeria Games List to find out more!