Mobile gaming taking China by storm
Staff Reporter 2013-07-08 16:10
An advert for the popular Chinese mobile game Million Arthur. (Internet photo)
Backed by huge numbers of mobile phone subscribers, the gaming industry in China has been growing by leaps and bounds to develop into a major industry.
According to figures released on July 3 by Tencent, China's largest internet company by value, the number of registered game software developers in the country topped 80,000 as of April, with the number of registered game applications exceeding 40,000.
The number of games racking up over 100,000 yuan (US$16,300) in monthly revenue also jumped by 65% year-on-year. While a game created by Tencent called Plants vs Zombies, launched in May last year, accumulated over 80 million yuan (US$13 million) in revenue as of June this year.
Numerous firms are scrambling to tap into the expanding market including some which have teamed up with foreign partners. On June 28, Giant Interactive Group signed an agreement with Ntree4v, a Korean game software developer, in Shanghai to cooperate in the R&D and marketing of mobile game products, with the first cooperative product Project Panda scheduled to hit the Chinese market in August. Peng Cheng, vice president of Giant Interactive, said that the company has sunk tens of millions of yuan into Project Panda, adding that four other mobile games will be rolled out by the end of the year.
The gaming craze has fueled stock prices of game developers, with stock price of Chinese game maker Ourpalm, soaring by 200% so far this year. The lucrative business is attracting the attention of firms outside the gaming industry, such as Datang Telecom and film production company Huayi Brothers reported to be planning to invest in mobile gaming firms.
According to iiMedia, an industry research body, the number of mobile game subscribers in China reached 286 million as of last year, up 62.5% year-on-year, including 47.9 million mobile phone online game subscribers, up 65.7% than a year earlier. Last year, the scale of the domestic mobile gaming market leapt by 79% to 5.9 billion yuan (US$962 million).
Song Wei, secretary general of the Beijing-based Global Mobile Game Confederation, said that mobile games are increasingly popular in the mobile internet age as they are extremely profitable. While numerous players including mobile communications carriers, game developers, and game service providers, are striving to carve out their share.
Game developers often have weaker clout in dealing with gaming service providers, which own game marketing channels and platforms, due to the huge number of the former. After deducting operating costs, what is left for game developers is often meager but the share of revenue for game developers can reach 70% at the platforms of Apple and some large mobile communications carriers.
