Planet J confident of growth this year

Damon Chan, director of Planet J

Planet J announced last week that it has added augmented and virtual reality games to the indoor theme park and has invited government officials to experience its eight gaming zones. 

Billed as “Asia’s love-action-role-play” theme park, the park offers a series of fantasy games; however, acquiring revenue remains problematic for the company.

Director of Planet J, Damon Chan, admitted that the MOP1 billion investment has not become profitable. Chan expressed his belief that the slow start was due to inadequate promotion.

Although the theme park opened in 2016, it only started to promote its site in January 2017. The introduction of online promotion led to a 30 percent increase in its visitors.

“We will continue do promotion for visitors in 2018. I expect to see double [in visitor numbers] at least,” Chan told the press.

Planet J was designed to be capable of hosting a total of 7 million people per year and they hope to see more visitors and reach a total that is closer to their full capacity this year.

“I can say that our promotion is not enough, so we will let more Macau, mainland and Hong Kong residents know more about it; these are our main markets,” said the director.

At Planet J, each player is accompanied by a “magic book” – a personalized mobile device that connects with more than 200 games.

Visitors will have to move through a series of themed zones, completing challenges that can be seen on the device.

“We independently created every game, which other places do not have. We went through a long tough time, because we created [the games] ourselves,” said Chan.

When questioned about whether they could continue to build the business even without profit, Chan said, “the number of visitors is lower than the minimum of our requirement but if you look at all the theme parks around the world, it takes three to five years for a theme park before it reaches its maturity.”

The director defended their progress, saying that although they have not reached their visitor arrival goals, he is confident that through the promotions that will be conducted this year, they will hit their target.

“It is a right decision to have opened it in Macau, even though we haven’t started to make money,” Chan concluded. LV