An American video game industry service provider is opening its first European office in Bertrange, attracted by the government’s campaign to make the Grand Duchy a hub for the gaming sector. Live Gamer, which provides behind-the-scenes services to game publishers, has launched its EU headquarters in Luxembourg, the company and the Grand Duchy’s government announced on Monday.

The firm joined other international gaming start-ups that have set up shop in Luxembourg in recent years, such as Kabam, Nexon, Valve and Zynga, as well as larger digital players such as Amazon, eBay, iTunes and PayPal.

Live Gamer offers digital publishers an “e-commerce and payments platform” which capitalises on the fast growing “direct-to-fan publishing” and “global digital free-to-play games” markets that originated in South Korea, company president Andrew Schneider told Delano and sister publication paperJam on Thursday in a joint interview. Successful companies in this genre include Riot Games and WarGaming.net (photo), he noted.

The New York-based company already established offices in California, China and South Korea as part of its global growth plan. “Many of our clients are multinational corporations looking to reach customers in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America including Sony Online, Facebook and Condé Nast,” said Schneider.

“Our new EU entity allows us to offer our clients a breadth of country-specific methods of payment helping them to convert sales at higher rates, local language consumer customer support and regional business-to-business customer support.”

Live Gamer’s Grand Duchy business is being headed up by Luxembourger Eric Meyer, an IT engineer who also manages B2B software firm Digiconcept. Schneider said that “we are thrilled to have Eric has part of the team and he has done a superb job of” getting the subsidiary going.

He did not reveal any future hiring plans, pointing out that the unit “is still in the planning phase and we are working to determine the staffing requirements and timing.”

However, Schneider said that Luxembourg will be the firm’s only European location for the foreseeable future.

“Great job of reaching out to the video games industry”

He also praised the government’s economic promotion efforts, explaining that: “Luxembourg has done a great job of reaching out to the video games industry and we first met representatives of Luxembourg based in New York a few years ago at an industry event.”

“When it was time to plan our European entry strategy, our European financial advisors helped us analyse several options, of which Luxembourg was a finalist. We selected Luxembourg for a number of reasons, including a business and technology-friendly climate, but also because of the game industry outreach and the relationship we built with [Luxembourg’s] New York representatives over the years,” Schneider said.