Forbes Feature on Garena

A good article on history of Garena, Southeast Asia’s answer to Tencent and Alibaba, and what brought Forrest Li to found it. Lisa Hanson is quoted in the article as well.

Steam’s Presence in China

Steam Spy’s data shows that an average game on Steam sells 320,000 units. Different countries have different usage patterns and China’s is similar to Russia’s 10 years ago when Russian players began to accept paid games (as compared to Free to Play). Similar to Russian players back then, Chinese players are hit-driven and love games with multiplayer components. Sergey Galyonkin, founder of Steam Spy, gave some suggestions to western developers hoping to enter overseas markets saying that they should research the target market’s preferences and behavior, find a niche to go after (instead of cloning a good game) and do marketing and PR way far in advance of releasing the game.

WeChat Succeeds in Indonesia

Chinese Internet giant Tencent is optimistic that its messaging application WeChat will be able to flourish in Indonesia where the number of smartphone users continues to increase. “Indonesia is one of most important markets outside of China, given the fact that the market is so big, penetration [of smartphones] is so low and the growth is so high,” said Tencent business development director Benny Ho. The relatively low smartphone penetration in Indonesia as compared to its population size provides a huge space for WeChat to attract more Indonesian customers who were very social online, he said during a recent interview with The Jakarta Post.