Correction In mid-August Niko Partners issued a post entitled ChinaJoy 2015 Recap. It summarized some of our observations at ChinaJoy. The entity that organizes ChinaJoy is called Howell Expo. Recently a representative of Howell Expo contacted Niko to say that two of our observations were misleading and we therefore are issuing this correction. 1. We wrote: [...]
Videogame Makers Battle Chinese Censors to Win Over Gamers China opened its market to game consoles several days ago by releasing the restriction on sales of consoles to those made within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. Now consoles may be manufactured and sold throughout the country, which eliminates a distribution and logistics hurdle that existed before, [...]
NVIDIA has announced the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV device powered by Tegra X1 with the capability of a significant game console and entertainment device. This will be a forerunner in the competitive race to own the living room entertainment experience worldwide. The company has not yet announced plans for China, but the SHIELD will launch in [...]
Niko on Forbes.com Check out Lisa Hanson's latest Forbes.com post, which was promoted on the Forbes Asia homepage. The article is The Chinese Internet Gets a Stronger Backbone. It has lots of interesting facts about the Internet infrastructure. NetEase Opens North America Office NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES) set up an office in North America, located in California, [...]
2015 will be an exciting time for the multibillion-dollar digital games industry in China. We’re going to see a number of developments in the coming year, including changes in gamer preferences, company ownership patterns, and hardware availability. These trends will create opportunity for companies able to discern and anticipate the upcoming shifts. Because one thing is [...]
Season's Greetings! We have just ended our 12th year of providing high integrity market intelligence reports and services on the Chinese and Southeast Asian digital games markets to clients around the world, and we are grateful to you for being part of that success. In 2014 we are proud to have accomplished great things, including publishing [...]
China Leading the Way for Mobile Games Distribution via Mobile Chat Apps Check out Lisa Hanson's latest article on Forbes.com. In it she discusses the interesting opportunity for mobile games distribution via mobile chat apps, using the example of Tencent's WeChat as one that is leading the pack globally. Xbox One Pricing in China BesTV has [...]
Originally posted on Forbes.com: Several publicly traded Chinese PC online game companies have broken from their stance of focusing only on PC online games by recognizing the trend for the future is the mobile platform. These companies are now scrambling to reinvent themselves in order to catch the boat before newer mobile-only game companies get too [...]
Originally posted on Forbes.com: In my 12 years of analysis on the games industry in China as managing partner of Niko Partners it has become clear that Chinese gamers can be very passionate about PC online gaming. PC online games can be client-software based (require a client installation) or web-browser based (no client software installation). Web-browser [...]
Tencent launched NCSoft’s Blade & Soul (MMORPG) November 28, 2013 in China. Last week, Tencent announced it reached 1.5 million PCU, which is lower than the 2.0 million that was speculated in December. Tencent has the Midas touch yet again: this is its 6th game with PCU greater than 1 million. Blade & Soul is without a [...]
