Recognizing Taiwan's strategic position and talent pool in the global gaming market, Side, a global gaming service provider under PTW Holdings, announced today (January 29) the official opening of its new studio in Nangang, Taipei.
Side, established for over 35 years and operating in Taiwan for over 8 years, acts as a game development service provider.Editor’s note:Imagine it as a technology turnkey provider in the gaming industry, offering assistance resources to game development teams to help them successfully complete a game. Even if the developers themselves do not have development capabilities, but have certain content planning ideas, they can still provide developers with resources to connect with third-party cloud infrastructure and build services, including subsequent platform listing, payment integration, or game customer service systems.
Chang Ti-hsin, head of Side Taipei Studio, pointed out that Side does not directly compete with platform operators such as Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. In fact, it maintains cooperative relationships with these operators, mainly providing appropriate technical resources to assist the development team according to their actual needs, so that more games and creative content can be successfully launched into the market.
Currently, Side provides services in the Taiwan market primarily through quality assurance, localization, and assistance with after-sales customer service resources. In addition to collaborating with 3-4 local Taiwanese game development teams, Side's main business in Taiwan at this stage involves undertaking localization translations for overseas game development teams, enabling their games to successfully enter the Traditional Chinese, English, and Korean markets.
Recognizing Taiwan's $46 billion GDP and cultural advantages
Chang Ti-hsin stated that Taiwan, situated at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures, boasts a workforce highly familiar with games and films from Europe, America, Japan, and Korea. This unique "cultural sensitivity" makes the Taipei team the ideal choice for multilingual translation and localization testing, encompassing Traditional Chinese, English, and Korean. This expansion in Taiwan will create 75 new job opportunities for the Taipei game industry. Furthermore, it will integrate the latest AI solutions to provide clients with comprehensive technical support, from game quality verification and localization to customer service.
As for the reasons for choosing to expand the Taiwan team, Side pointed out that Taiwan has about 1450 million gamers, making it one of the top 15 game markets in the world. In addition, the spending power of gamers is amazing. It is estimated that the output value of Taipei's game industry will grow to US$46.4 billion by 2030. Furthermore, the Taipei team has successfully executed more than 100 projects in the past year, and the promotion rate of full-time employees is as high as 10%, highlighting the significant growth momentum of the Taiwan business. Therefore, it is believed that expanding the size of the Taiwan team will be beneficial to promoting the development of the industry.
Keep up with the generative AI wave
On the technology front, Side is also keeping up with the trend of generative AI. Last year, Side announced a collaboration with Razer to develop the world's first AI-powered hybrid game testing and QA solution, "Razer Cortex: Playtest Program – Powered by Side," which integrates game testing with game quality verification.
Side CEO Deborah Kirkham pointed out that the development focus for 2026 is to integrate AI into localization and localized quality verification processes. In an on-site interview, Side emphasized that it will not replace human labor with AI, but rather use AI to assist in handling repetitive and tedious testing tasks, allowing professionals to focus more on nuanced contextual refinement and user experience optimization.
Furthermore, Side has shifted its positioning from a simple "turnkey provider" to a "co-development partner." Even independent developers lacking technical manpower or teams with creative ideas but no coding skills can collaborate on content creation through the technical resources (programming, testing, art) provided by Side, and can handle various types of game content, including AAA titles.
