Elfender is a browser-based tower defense game that is developed by Beijing-based Ourpalm and published by Guangzhou-based ClapAlong. The game has a complicated mix of puzzle, strategy, adventure, and management.
When firstly distributed in China, Elfender has been considered devoid of wit and inventiveness, a slavish copy of the original Plants vs. Zombies and DDTank. On March, 31, Clapalong, a Chinese online game publisher localized 植物大作战 into elfender and rolls out the first closed beta. The Chinese version is also hosted on Facebook and available at http://apps.facebook.com/plantwar_tw. The game received an extremely negative response from players and industry practitioners.
Elfender features cute and lovely characters who can engage in PVE and PVE, or choose to fight other NPCs and monsters. Furthermore, players can summon up a variety of monsters and elves to assist in the battle.
With more Chinese online games rush into North American Market, the playing ground in US are already saturated with copycat production. While Chinese developers are still confident of this market, hoping to get more revenue by adverting their games using New Ad platform Facebook.
Besides Batheo that is purely inspired from Three Kingdoms Online, ClapAlong now secured the rights to distribute global version of Elfender. We still did not know why Chinese games are that succesful even they just plagiarized other company’s efforts.
With its headquarters set in Guangzhou, China, Clapalong is poised to localized more Chinese browser games into English-speaking Countries, seeking more opportunities to go global.
The first English localization Batheo has been proven a little bit successful although they invested about $ 1 Million ad fees, yet with 17 servers live so far. The company envisions this new casual browser multiplayer game that lets players play a no-download and fully fledged strategy MMO in the web browser with no additional download fees.