Indonesian online game publisher, Gemscool on 31 Maret 2021 finally closed its service. For anyone who doesn’t know gemscool. they are the largest online game publisher in Indonesia at its time. In 2010 almost all internet cafes in Indonesia had/installed games from gemscool. Not only that, even when gemscool held a partnership program for existing internet cafes, almost all internet cafes in Indonesia (more than 50%) registered themselves in the program.
In its time, Gemscool had tons of popular games from various genres. Starting from FPS filled featured games like Point Blank, to MMO-RPG games like Dragonnest. At that time, when viewed from the development of PC games, it was very difficult to think that Gemscool would close in the future because almost all games published by Gemscool had a very large active player base. even if the number of players in the Point Blank game alone is added to the number of players of other games in different game publishers such as nexus, netmarble, and megaxus, it can be clearly seen that the player base of 1 game on Gemscool is very large.
While Gemscool had a lot going for it in the past, it wasn’t enough to keep it afloat in a volatile market. The Gemscool company, which was founded in 2007, proved to be closed in the end. Although there is not much exact information why they closed their services, but certainly it was because Gemscool focused too hard on an obsolete basic foundation. which he focused too much on publishing PC games, even though in the following years mobile games have taken a significant market, at that time mobile games that were on the rise were still filled with simple games like COC and other farming games, which in the following years FPS and War games also entered the mobile market more.
With the increasing number of mobile games and their types, as well as the convenience of mobile games that can be played anywhere, little by little the internet cafe industry is also increasingly eroded. At the same time, gemscool, which focuses on pc games, is also starting to lose many of its players.
In addition to the above problems, Gemscool exacerbated its blunder by releasing its most popular online game licenses such as Lostsaga, Dragonnest, and PointBlank, even though the three games above were very dominant in the online game market in their time, but they (Gemscool) instead released the license.
This was exacerbated by the following year where Gemscool added to their collection of games with unpopular “generic” games, so this worsened Gemscool’s finances. and it kept repeating itself until Gemscool closed its services.
What we can learn from this Gemscool case is to always be open to change, and strive to be responsive to the market. Maintaining idealism is important, but if the concept behind the idealism is not strong enough, then any idealism will be destroyed.
