China to Establish IP Court

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 in-house and 3rd party game development.

Mobile Data Traffic Jams in China

Use of mobile data is growing so fast in China that the mobile Internet providers are struggling to keep up. China Unicom had an outage last week in Beijing and users were irate, according to a post on Tech in Asia. Telecom providers will continue to be challenged by the growth in numbers of smartphone users (200 million new 3G users were added to the system in 2013 alone) who all want to use mobile data.

Vietnam’s Game Market

Regulatory oversight in Vietnam makes it very difficult for game developers to justify investment in developing games for the local market, which has led to company closures as well as diversification beyond game development or beyond the Vietnam border. It has been several years of tight regulatory hold on the games industry, and that has led to survival of the biggest and strongest companies with little room for smaller companies to be able to carve out a niche for themselves. Niko will evaluate the Vietnamese market in our upcoming Southeast Asian Games Market Regional Report.

China to Establish IP Court

China will establish an Intellectual Property court, with two more planned this year. The WTO countries have been pushing China for IP protection laws for both digital and physical products. This new court is part of broad planned legal reform in China.