Southeast Asia's Silicon Valley Slashdot posted a story that highlights Vietnam's tech boom, something that we are following because of our continuing market research on the Southeast Asian digital games market. While Vietnam continues to have strict regulatory policies governing telecom and digital games distribution, the market is one of the most exciting to watch within [...]
Chinese Mobile Gamers Gamelook cited Niko Partners research on Chinese mobile gaming in an article discussing how the domestic mobile games market will soon become the #1 market in the world, surpassing the US market revenue by the end of 2015. Market revenue has risen 6X in the past 4 years, and Niko's forecast for 2015 [...]
Smartphone Shipments in China Here is data reported by Gamelook on select Chinese smartphone manufacturers' shipments in 2014 and 2015: Huawei: According to Gamelook, Huawei shipped 75 million smartphones in 2014, up 40% YoY. Huawei's goal for 2015 is 100 million units and the company shipped 50 million units in 1H 2015. Xiaomi: Xiaomi shipped 34.7 [...]
Perfect World Potentially Going Private Perfect World might be the next publicly traded Chinese online games operator to go private, following similar moves by Shanda Games and Giant Interactive. Perfect World's chairman of the board, Chi Yu Feng, offered $3.49/share for the company. The news pushed the stock price up 22% on NASDAQ. Vietnam's Internet Slowed [...]
Tencent's Mobile Game Partners Tencent Games VP Wang Bo announced that Tencent mobile game partners will receive RMB 3 billion ($490 million) in revenue share in 2015. Tencent launched 33 games on Ying Yong Bao (MyApp Store), and 8 of those have reached #1 on iOS F2P ranks and best-seller ranks. The company is emphasizing both [...]
Baidu's Mobile Game Report Baidu's Mobile Game September report shows that Baidu launched 185 mobile games in September. These include online games, dominated by card and action genres, and downloadable games, dominated by casual, shooter and action genres. The online game genres contribute the most revenue. The #1 downloadable offline game ranked by gross revenue is [...]
Niko Partners at GamesBeat On Tuesday Sept 16th Niko Partners' own Michele Maguire was the moderator for a fireside chat with Jeff Lyndon, co-founder of iDreamSky, at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco in a track called "Why China has become the hottest games market." The Xbox One in China Chinese consumers are gearing up for [...]
The Flappy Bird Saga The Flappy Bird saga has been all over the game industry the past few weeks - from the game's surprising origins (created by a single developer, Dong Nguyen, in Vietnam) to its meteoric/questionable rise in the app stores, and now the controversial deletion of the game permanently by Nguyen. Forbes has a [...]
Vietnam Ministry of Information and Communications overturned the ban on new online game licenses that had plagued the local games industry for three full years. As of September 1st the ban is no longer in place, though it is vague as to what games will be approved for a true license. It should be noted that despite the [...]
Tech in Asia made us aware of a Reuters news item that stated that Vietnam’s regulations are poised to clamp down on chap apps. The policy under consideration is supported by Vietnamese telcos and would ban chap apps such as locally made Viber, as well as Line, Whatsapp, KakaoTalk and WeChat. The telcos would like to [...]
