FIFA Online 3

FIFA Online 3 (developed by Electronic Arts) is operated by Tencent in China, and reached PCU of more than 500,000 this month. Xiaoyi Ma, VP of Tencent Games, said that sports games like NBA2K Online and FIFA Online 3 comprise a smaller niche segment of the online games market in China, and this is a new area for Tencent to enter. The beta test of FIFA Online 3 launched in May 2014 and the game thus far has exceeded Tencent’s expectation. Tencent is an investor in Garena, the Southeast Asian regional online game operator powerhouse. Garena operates FIFA Online 3 in SEA (as well as League of Legends, Blackshot, and more) and has achieved great success there as we discuss in our latest report published last week, The 2014 Southeast Asian Games Market & 5-year Forecast Report.

South Korea’s Changing Game Market

Our friends at Tech in Asia report that the Korean online games market has shifted dramatically from 2013 until now, as they noticed at G-Star in Busan recently. Foreign game titles were popular at that exhibition, and domestic developers are looking to China for their own growth rather than to their home market of Korea. The government enacted a policy to cap a person’s spending in online games and there has been increasing competition from overseas. Both of these negatively impacted the market growth.

Linekong Interactive to Go Public

Another Chinese PC online game operator will list its shares publicly. Linekong Interactive released says that it plans to issue 110,952,000 shares globally, at price of HK$ 9.8-13.1 per share. Calculated based on this information Linekong will raise up to HK$ 1.45 billion (about $190 million). The shares will list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under 8287.

Mobile Outpaces PC in SEA Markets

In case you missed our news releases, Niko Partners published our 2014 Southeast Asian Games Market Report & 5-year Forecast on December 4th and it is a very comprehensive study presented in PowerPoint covering the six markets of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Any questions on it? Just ask us! Visit our Research Store for the press release, TOC and to purchase.

SkyMobi

As Venture Beat writes in an article about SkyMobi (for which Lisa Cosmas Hanson was interviewed), the Chinese company is publicly traded yet little known to foreigners. It is 9 years old with 600 employees and operates the Maopao app platform. The platform is preinstalled on lower end phones and primarily serves cities in Tiers 3-5, a differentiator when compared with other companies in this field such as iDreamSky, Yodo1 and newer entrant Golden Gate Games.