CipSoft GmbH is the company that developed and produced the game Tibia.

Based in Regensburg, Germany, they began in 1995 as a group of university students who had the notion to write an online role playing game. The company was formally founded in June 2001 by Stephan Börzsönyi, Guido Lübke, Ulrich Schlott, and Stephan Vogler, when the students decided to run Tibia full-time after graduating from the university.

The founders act as executive officers of the company. They still maintain Tibia today (with the assistance of paid and volunteer staff), and regularly release content updates, game patches, and feature modifications.

Their most recent claim to fame was the release of the first on-line role-playing game for handheld devices, TibiaME.

Contents 1 Origin of the name 2 The CipSoft team 3 Products 4 Company's Data 5 External Links

Origin of the name Edit

Initially, the creators of Tibia named their team "CIP Productions." When the company was founded, the name was changed to CipSoft.

According to the Markus Hof (a.k.a. Judigator), in an interview to TibiaNews [1], the word CIP comes from the german acronym of "Computer Investitions Projekt". This is a project where universities invest in rooms with computers for their students, and the Tibia project was born in one of these rooms.

The CipSoft team Edit

As at November 2006, the team consisted of 4 executive officers plus 23 full-time employees who work in 6 different departments:

• Programmers: development of the client, the server software, the website, and tools for the development and management of the games
• Content team: creation of game content (e.g. graphics, quests, game mechanics, story, NPCs' text, design of areas, etc.)
• System administrators: looking after the game servers in the computer centres and responsibility for the maintenance of the office's infrastructure
• Customer support: supporting the players via email, website boards and also in-game
• Marketing: identifying the wishes of the players for game features, managing the public relations of the company, advertising and distribution
• Organization: doing all the administrative tasks, and checking if everything is going fine

You can find more information about the staff members in various Interviews with them.

Products Edit

CipSoft's official site says that its "vision is to develop and to publish innovative products that are based on new technologies", and that they "do not necessarily confine ourselves to computer games, but the focus of our expertise is clearly on the fields of IT, software development, Internet, entertainment, computer games and community management" [2].

Its first product was the game Tibia, which was one of the first graphical online role-playing games; it was initially developed as a hobby, and later it became a commercial game. The second product was Tibia Micro Edition (TibiaME), the very first MMORPG for mobile phones.

CipSoft is currently working on the development of a third game (that has nothing to do with Tibia), for which they hired a 3-d artist. The game is named "Fiction Fighters". The game is described at official website as:

Fiction Fighters® is an interactive comic
in which players enter a parallel comic universe.
The players act and interact exclusively in 3D comic strips.
Fiction Fighters is a browser-based multiplayer game.
In various game modes, characters can solve exciting quests,
fight against each other, explore the background story,
meet with other players or even develop their own stories and comic strips.
Comic strips are the central element in Fiction Fighters.
Players act and interact exclusively in comic strips.
Fiction Fighters is a browser-based multiplayer game
where all comic panels will be rendered server-side in 3D.

Official website

Company's Data Edit

The following table shows the evolution of the turnover and number of employees of CipSoft, since it was founded until the end of 2009:

Year	Turnover (Euro)	Number of Employees (end of year)
2001	27,595	4
2002	151,049	4
2003	815,908	7
2004	2,763,784	16
2005	4,047,663	22
2006	4,778,761	27
2007	6,266,947	36
2008	7,135,528	44
2009	7,322,665	56
2010	7,873,114	64

External Links Edit

CipSoft GmbH official website

See also: CipSoft Members