Did you know that esports has entered its golden jubilee this year? It has been 50+ years since the first-ever esports event took place at Stanford University in 1972 when 24 players competed in an Intergalactic Spacewar tournament, and the winner received a year’s subscription to the Rolling Stone magazine. Fast forward to 2023, technological advancement [...]
Sony Interactive Entertainment Shanghai held a press conference on November 22 where it announced the third phase of its China Hero Project. The China Hero Project is an initiative from Sony launched in 2016 to provide funding and resources to Chinese developers for them to bring games to the PlayStation platform for China and global markets. [...]
Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase confirmed on November 17 that the publishing license covering several Blizzard developed titles in mainland China will not be renewed when it expires on January 23, 2023. This will cause the shutdown of World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo III, Warcraft III, Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft titles in mainland China [...]
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, which launched in mainland China (first market worldwide) on iOS, Android, and PC on September 9, 2021 has had the most successful video game launch of this year in the country. Harry Potter: Magic Awakened was developed by NetEase with support from Portkey Games and is an RPG game with card-based combat that takes place in the Harry Potter universe [...]
The 19th China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference (ChinaJoy) took place July 30 - August 2, 2021, with a theme “Create Dreams with Technology and Win the Future with Fun.” There were more than 500 exhibitors across the B2B and B2C segments, nearly 30% of which were foreign, that displayed games, hardware, accessories, and new technological [...]
Sony Interactive Entertainment Shanghai announced April 29th that it will launch the PlayStation 5 in Mainland China on May 15, 2021. The disc version of the PS5 will cost RMB 3,899 and the digital version will cost RMB 3,099. Sony announced that it was currently preparing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (Sony), Sackboy: A Big Adventure [...]
China bans fundraising through ICOs China has banned and made illegal the practice of raising funds through digital token based initial coin offerings (ICO). The rise of cryptocurrencies has led to $2.2 billion having been raised through ICOs this year alone. Chinese regulators have described initial coin offerings as “a form of unapproved illegal public financing” [...]
Chinese Overseas Investments Now Restricted China has tightened the reins on external investment to combat rising debt ratios for domestic companies. One of the “restricted” areas is “entertainment." We are not lawyers, but this seems to include digital gaming. We will work with our friends at Pillar Legal to sort out what it really means for [...]
China Unicom to Raise $11.7 Billion from Private Firms China Unicom is said to be raising $11.7 billion from investors including the likes of Tencent and Alibaba. China Unicom will be the first of the state-run telecom entities to receive private capital and mixed ownership. China Mobile is still the world's largest mobile phone operator in [...]
According to Tencent’s Q1 2017 financial release dated 17 May 2017, total online games revenue in the first quarter was 22,800 million RMB ($3,360 million). That’s $3 billion in one quarter alone, just from online games! The financial report says that PC client-based games revenue was 14,100 million RMB ($2,070 million) and mobile games revenue was [...]
