Ankama

Ankama
legal form	SAS
founding	2001
Seat	Roubaix , France
Number of employees	400
Branch	Media: computer games, comics, magazines, TV animated films
Website	www.ankama.com

Ankama is a French group of companies founded in 2001 that is active in the field of artistic and digital design. Her original main activity was designing websites for external customers. Meanwhile, ANKAMA is mainly known for its online role-playing game Dofus . The name of the company goes back to the first names of the three founders of the company, Anthony Roux , Camille Chafer and Emmanuel Darras : ANthony, KAmille, MAnu. ANKAMA is based in a former textile factory in Roubaix (near Lille ) in northern France and currently employs around 400 people.

history

2001 was the foundation of Ankama Web, a service provider in the field of Internet pages. 2003 saw the start of development of Dofus , the company's first computer game, a combat-based game at the beginning, which over time became an online role-playing game. After almost a year in beta testing, Dofus was released on the internet and has been updated regularly ever since. In the same year Dofus won the Best Game Award and the Audience Award at the Flash Festival in Paris. In September 2005 the English version of the game was released. Ankama begins work on its second game, Dofus Arena , a combat-based game. The in-house publisher, Ankama Editions , is founded.

A new project, Wakfu , the sequel to DOFUS, was developed in 2006, while Dofus won the Best Game Award and the Audience Award at the Flash Festival in Seattle (USA), Audience Award at the Independent Game Festival in San José (USA) for media for the youth. In 2007 a subsidiary, Ankama Animation , was founded. She should mainly deal with the production of a TV series on Wakfu. The alpha version of Wakfu will be unveiled at Japan Expo and new expansions for Dofus will be released. The first German server Nehra is opened for DOFUS. The TV series Wakfu was broadcast on France 3 in 2008. Ankama Play is founded, a subsidiary that develops console games. His first Xbox Live arcade project, Islands of Wakfu , is being developed in partnership with Microsoft. In 2009 a branch was opened in Nakano, a district of Tokyo, in which animation projects are carried out.

Ankama presented itself at a booth at Gamescom in Cologne in 2009 and presented DOFUS 2.0 , a graphic and technological update for DOFUS. In April 2010, Slage was released, a game that was not released in Flash for the first time, but in 3D. A new expansion of Dofus appears, and Ankama announces a collaboration with the German publisher TOKYOPOP , which will publish comics and mangas in German.

Business areas

Ankama Web

Ankama Web is an interactive communication agency founded in 2001, which deals with the design and production of websites for external customers and the development of interactive marketing solutions.

Ankama Games

Ankama Games is a company founded in 2003, which mainly deals with the development of online games.

• Dofus is Ankama's first game and also the first MMORPG programmed in Flash.
• Dofus Arena , whose public beta tests began at the beginning of 2006, is the tournament version of Dofus: The combat system has been retained in the game, but the players have to put together a team of fighters within a given budget, equip them and take part in tournaments against other players compete.
• Wakfu is also an MMORPG set 1,000 years after Dofus. The players have the opportunity to have a say in the society in which they play.
• Wakfu - the Guardians , a browser game related to the Wakfu TV series. The players have the opportunity to face the opponents of the TV series in various missions.

One game that is still in development is Slage , the first game from Ankama to use 3D graphics.

Ankama Editions

Ankama Editions is the Ankama Group's publisher founded in 2005 and mainly publishes its own comics, mangas and art books. The publisher's most successful publications are closely related to the universes of the Ankama games, such as B. DOFUS art books (3 volumes), the DOFUS manga series (12 volumes), the Pandala comic (3 volumes) and the DOFUS monsters series (3 volumes). The publisher's first German manga, Dofus Monster: The Black Knight, was published in April 2008.

Ankama animation

Ankama Animation is a company founded in 2007 that produces cartoons and TV series. Her first project is Wakfu, a TV series consisting of 52 episodes of 26 minutes each.

Ankama press

Ankama Presse, founded in 2007, publishes Ankama magazines and magazines. These include DOFUS Mag , which reports on news from the game universes of Ankama, and IG Mag , a general magazine about computer games.

Ankama Play

Ankama Play is an independent console video game developer studio founded in 2008 and part of the Ankama Group. Ankama Play's first project is Islands of Wakfu, a game released for the Xbox 360.

Squid

Kalmeo is based in Lyon, France and develops applications for mobile phones such as: B. DOFUS Pocket , in which DOFUS players can discuss with each other in chat mode, determine the characteristics of their character, switch to dealer mode, manage guilds or feed their pets in the game.

Further products

Ankama has had a partnership with Upperdeck since 2009 , where a trading card game Wakfu TCG was created. The first set was released in French in October 2009 and consists of 320 cards. Goodies such as plush toys, T-shirts, mobile phone tags and mouse pads are also produced by Ankama.

From 2009 to 2013 Ankama published the video game magazine IG Magazine .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erwan Cario: "Dofus" fête ses fans. In: Liberation, No. 8997, April 16, 2010, p. 36 (French)