San Francisco, CA – Bigpoint, one of the largest online gaming portals, and hi5, a leading social entertainment web site, today launched Seafight, Bigpoint’s flagship Flash-based pirate game, to users worldwide on the hi5 Games channel. The game is available globally in 20 languages, making it the most widely translated game out of the hundreds of game titles available through hi5.

Seafight is a real-time fantasy-adventure game and Bigpoint’s most popular title. Since the game runs entirely in Flash, hi5 users can play Seafight directly from the hi5 Games page, with no separate application installation. Users default to a language in the game based on their hi5 language preference. Initial languages supported include English (UK and US), German, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brasil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The game, which is live on hi5 today, will be prominently featured on the hi5 Games page.

“Given our multi-lingual global user base, deploying in-language premium content is a major priority for us,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and chief product officer of hi5. “Bigpoint shares this world view and has been a leader in translating their innovative Flash-based games to a wide variety of languages, which makes them a good partner for hi5.”

“As one of the world’s largest online communities, hi5 provides a very compelling distribution channel for our best-in-class online games,” said Heiko Hubertz, CEO Bigpoint GmbH. “With localized versions of Seafight for virtually every hi5 user, regardless of language, we will be able to jointly tap into new markets that English-only gaming and social sites cannot effectively address.”

The partnership is the latest in hi5’s strategy of aligning with leading game developers worldwide to distribute their titles through the hi5 Games channel to the site’s 60 million plus monthly users. With global advertising support and a virtual currency interface for collecting in-game payments, hi5 is a compelling new distribution and monetization option for third-party game developers. The companies expect to integrate additional Bigpoint titles into hi5 in the future.

About hi5 Networks
Headquartered in San Francisco, hi5 is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing social entertainment sites. Our focus is on delivering a fun, interactive, and immersive social experience online to our users around the world. With over 60 million unique visitors every month, hi5 is a top 20 website globally and the number one social site in dozens of countries across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The service is available in over 50 languages, delivering localized content, games and other applications to users worldwide. For more information on hi5, visit http://www.hi5.com

About Bigpoint
Bigpoint.com is the largest browser game portal worldwide, and is among the top 3 gaming portals in the world. Bigpoint’s range of products and services includes games at a level of quality which, until now, was only available with CDs and consoles. Bigpoint GmbH is a publisher of online games, a content provider for media agencies and a developer of browser-based games. Over 240 employees from more than 25 different nations work at the world’s largest Internet provider of browser games, which is based in Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. At the German headquarters, games are developed in over 20 languages and are played for free by over 74 million users worldwide. For more information on Bigpoint, visit http://www.bigpoint.net/