[caption caption="www.indogamers.com"][/caption]
In the month of June many players were confused upon what happened to the widely popular game among Indonesians. The PB launcher displayed an error that normally occurred during server maintenance over the course of the month. It was then announced on their website that PB was be shut down by Gemscool. However, by the next month Point Blank was up and running again although with a different publisher, Garena Indonesia. How did this come to be?
Point Blank is unarguably one of the most popular FPS games in Indonesia holding lots of prominence. Its availability at every internet café, ease of registration and simplicity allows the community to rapidly grow. Events held are common as well as tournaments on the international scale.
But contrary to popular belief, Point Blank was never Gemscool’s to own. So stating that Gemscool sold Point Blank to Garena is incorrect. PB was developed by Zepetto, a South Korean company creating games with PB happening to be its most successful yet. The game was released in 2008 first by South Korea and since then has spread to many parts of the world such as Brazil, Russia, many SEA countries and also the United States under the name Project Blackout/Piercing Blow.
According to GameQQ.net Gemscool has saw PB as slow in terms of development, having only one major update over the last 7 years while the rest being cosmetic items. With Zepetto unable to permanently block cheats and hacks Gemscool decided to look elsewhere and moved on to Black Squad. Garena has had success with PB in SEA countries other than Indonesia and seeing this took the opportunity to officially license Indo PB from Zepetto. Upon entering the game the loading screen in bold words says “Cheaters Eradicated” and “100% stable servers” showing that Garena is very confident with their game.
So far PB Garena has been a success. Followed by registration players receive 50,000 in game cash, a few weapons, items and characters attracting many players to sign up their new Garena account. This is something that Gemscool has never done before. Also, more experience points are achieved after each match making leveling faster. There have also been fewer complaints of cheaters.
The only slight problem for now is the account transfer. As Gemscool from now on has no business with Point Blank, Garena Indonesia is currently working on the process to enable transferring PB accounts from Gemscool to the new PB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Blank_%282008_video_game%29
https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Blank_Online
http://www.zepetto.com/en/pointblank.do
http://www.duniaku.net/2015/06/10/point-blank-indonesia-garena/
