Nintendo Makes Its Presence Official In Southeast Asia With Singaporean Website

While there are plenty of ways to get your hands on a Nintendo Switch here in Malaysia, the company doesn’t actually have an official presence. Never mind in the country, the company doesn’t even have an official presence in Southeast Asia. But it looks like this are changing, as the company now has an official Singaporean website.

The website itself is pretty bare bones, and you would be forgiven to go as far as to say that it’s still incomplete. One of the few things that give the impression are the URL for the games. None of them are referred to by name, instead they get a serial number equivalent that’s made up of four letters – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is just “aaaa” for example.

And then there’s the fact that there’s no mention of price pretty much anywhere. Not for the games, nor for the hardware. This may have something to do with the fact that Nintendo also has official stores on Shopee and Lazada, also only for Singapore.

This is quite the change for Nintendo, which has generally left the supply of its hardware to the regional distributor Maxsoft, or M.M.Soft in Malaysia. That being said, it remains to be seen if this will actually change anything for customers, especially when it comes to the prices of hardware.

As for the website itself, it may be a might-as-well move for the company. After all, Universal Studios Singapore is also getting a Super Nintendo World theme expansion which, according to Geek Culture, is scheduled to be completed in 2025.

Fundraising For Southeast Asia Tech Startups Steady Despite Pandemic

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, fundraising for Southeast Asian tech startups remained steady in 2020, Bloomberg said citing a report by venture capital firm Cento Ventures. Big winners include Grab, Go-Jek and Go-Pay, Bukalapak, and Traveloka – together they received over half of all investment last year.

Tech startups in Southeast Asia raised a total of US$8.2 billion (~RM34 billion) in 2020 – just a 3% drop compared to 2019. Most of that capital (70%) headed to Indonesia, while Malaysia just received a paltry 5% of the total investment volume.

To be fair, Thailand and Vietnam got 5% and 4% respectively. And there’s an obvious reason why Indonesia is such hot real estate – its 270 million plus population.

The bigger picture is that the raging pandemic has barely dampened investment appetite, which is why Grab’s fintech unit raised US$300 million (~RM 1.21 billion) in January. Grab is also mulling a US IPO later this year.

Furthermore, any skittishness about the pandemic-stricken economy is quickly counteracted by the massive demand for e-commerce and contactless payment. Unsurprisingly, over half of tech investment in the region went to super-app companies and online retailers – reaching over US$4 billion (~RM16.6 billion) last year.

And you wonder why everyone and their mother talks about super-apps these days. If anything, the pandemic has made them invaluable to our daily lives.

“2020 offered a harsh reason to reassess how technology can be harnessed to maintain vital function of the society,” said Dmitry Levit, a partner at Cento Ventures, told Bloomberg.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League May Have Broken HBO Go Asia

It has been a long wait for the fans of DC Extended Universe but today, they are finally able to catch the much-anticipated Zack Snyder’s Justice League. In selected markets throughout Asia including Malaysia, the 3 hours 52 minutes movie is being made available through HBO Asia’s streaming service, HBO Go.

For our market, the access to Zack Snyder’s Justice League was scheduled to be opened at 3:01 PM Malaysian time. However, things went awry rather quickly as disgruntled users begin to flood HBO Asia’s social media pages and complained that they were not able to watch the movie.

To HBO Asia’s credit though, the company has responded to its users in less than 20 minutes after technical difficulties began to haunt users. It was done through a message on HBO Asia’s Twitter and Facebook page in which the company said that it is indeed aware of the issue and currently working to rectify it.

At the time this article was published, we were still experiencing slow loading time on the HBO Go app and website but we did eventually manage to load the movie within 5 to 10 minutes. Your mileage may vary but based on our experience, it seems that the cause behind the issue could be a sudden spike of users jumping on the platform which is something that HBO should have expected given the hype that surrounds Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

On another hand, if you obtained access to HBO Go via your Astro subscription, you can also catch Zack Synder’s Justice League via Astro GO. While the satellite TV company did face some technical difficulties at first , it has since confirmed that customers should already be able to watch the movie which is also fondly referred to as Snyder Cut through the service.