In Conversation with Forrest Li, Founder of Garena

If you are an online gamer e.g. Counter Strike, Warcraft 3 or Call of Duty 4, Garena is a multi-functional platform that allow games to chat, challenge opponents and play their favourite games online with millions of gamers out there globally. As a Singaporean based IDM company, Garena is one of the biggest PC online game communities with 23M registered users from 210 countries. What’s the story behind Garena? Through the lens of Forrest Li, the founder of the company, we interviewed him on how Garena serves the online gaming community out there in the world, the interesting features that they like new users to know, their expansion plans to other markets and his thoughts on gaming industry in Asia.

BL: Hi Forrest, great to have you here on SGE. What did you do before setting up Garena?
Forrest Li: Thanks for having me here, Bernard. I worked for MTV Networks on digital media development. Before that, I was in the U.S. for my MBA study at Stanford University. Prior to Business school, I worked for Motorola in China.

BL: What is the inspiration behind Garena?
Forrest Li: “Connecting world gamers”, as our slogan expresses. Interactive game is evolving into an important entertainment format in our daily life. For young generation, it may be even more important than TV, Radio, or movie. We believe interactive game will be beyond entertainment, with its increasing social and economic influence. On the other hand, we believe interactive game is something that all human being understand and enjoy, across countries, races, languages and religions, etc. It can be a common language to bring everybody together for better mutual understanding. Garena can help accelerate this trend through our innovative products and services.

BL: Can you briefly tell us what Garena is about and how does it serve the gamers who are using the platform?
Forrest Li: Garena is a community for gamers worldwide. Today, we have 23 million registered gamers from 210 countries, and still growing rapidly. Most of gamers find us from friend’s referral or word of mouth. We build up this 23 million people Global Arena through our flagship product, a downloadable gaming platform. Gamers can easily go to our website: www.garena.com to download the software for free and it is available in 10 languages.

The most exciting thing about this platform is every time you log on, you will be immediately connected to another 400,000 gamers who are also on the platform at that moment. They are from every corner of the world but share the same passion on games.

BL: What are the three most interesting features on the Garena platform that you like people (who have not signed up with Garena) to know about?
Forrest Li: Here are the three features that I like to recommend for new users coming to Garena:

• Instant messenger: different from other popular messengers like MSN or Yahoo messenger, Garena messenger allows users to talk to any other users on the platform. It is more social and brings more gamers together. Garena messenger helps gamers a lot for match making. Gamers can easily ask around and find peers who want to play the same game at the same time, so even a 5 Vs 5 team based game play can be quickly started. More than that, after one game, if gamers enjoy the game play and admire each other’s skill set, they can easily add each other as buddies. When they come back to the platform next time, they will know if their buddies are online or offline and which game they are playing, and just by one click on “trace buddy” button, they will be able to find the buddy.
• Clan system: Clan is a very important concept among gamers. It is relatively similar to Group concept, but means much more to gamers. A Clan could be a more organized group with clearer objective and stricter joining criteria. It is usually for gamers who share same level passion or have similar level of skill set for certain games. Clan members often meet up regularly to play games and exchange thoughts. Garena clan system help gamers to easily create clan, appoint clan leadership roles, recruit new members and can also facility clan group conference and events.
  
• Ladder system: A lot of gamers are competitive by nature. They are willing to show off their game play skills and achievement to friends and to the world. Garena ladder system provides gamers a stage to fulfill their desire. We even have a country ranking ladder, which gives gamers a chance to fight for their national pride.
  
  

BL: Among all the features that Garena provide, for example, organizing and playing tournaments, Garena TV, which is the favorite among most gamers?
Forrest Li: Network optimization! This is not a fancy feature at surface, but indeed something every gamer needs for playing multiplayer games online. The feature can reduce latency and data loss for online gameplay and make possible a gamer from Singapore play against a gamer from Vietnam. This is how we connect world gamers together initially.

BL: How does Garena generate revenues from the platform?
Forrest Li: The platform is free to use and we offer some premium features as paid features. We get great financial support from our users. Today, 90% of our revenue from the paid features sales.

BL: Has Garena expanded into other markets beyond Singapore? If so, what are the important lessons you learn from moving a business operation overseas?
Forrest Li: Garena was born to serve global users. As I mentioned, our users are located in more than 200 counties. In our slim development and operation team, our staffs are from 7 nationalities. So Garena is very global. We have plans to expand operations in Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines and Russia.

BL: What are the trends you observed about the gaming industry in Asia?
Forrest Li: Asia will take the lead in global gaming industry. The Asia population size already determines that Asia will be the biggest gaming market. I believe Asia is already ahead of America and Europe in term of business model and game service concept. What Asia is still behind is game development. With the increasing respect on original intellectual property in Asia, our Asia version “ Blizzard Entertainment” will arise sooner or later.

BL: What are the three most important traits of an entrepreneur?
Forrest Li: The best answer is Steve Job’s speech at Stanford University Graduation Commencement 2005. I was fortunate to be among audience there for my wife’s graduation that day and deeply impressed by Job’s entrepreneurial spirits through his 3 real life stories. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish! Here is the video and transcript to the speech:

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