Mobile Game Emulators in China
When mobile games started to gain popularity a few years ago they were almost entirely casual games, such as puzzle or kids games. In the past year or two the market has embraced mid-core and hard-core mobile games, such as RPGs or strategy titles. This has led to mid-core and hard-core PC gamers to take a second look at mobile games, and in China they have embraced them. Another outcome is that these PC gamers have found a way to play mobile games on their preferred platform, the PC. They do so by using mobile game emulator software. One example known in the West and quite popular in China is BlueStacks.
To read up more about this new trend, check out our full article on Forbes.
WeChat’s ‘No Cash Day’
The payment war continues to get more intense in China as WeChat’s “No Cash Day” gave out random gifts of money (up to 888 yuan/$133 USD) from August 1st through the 7th. So long as they used WeChat Pay’s service, they were qualified for the random winnings. According to ChinaDaily, “On August 8, when users use WeChat Pay to make payments, they can spend the accumulated money rewarded to them over the previous seven days. In addition, they have the opportunity to get a direct discount on payments.”
WeChat, run by Tencent, is creeping more into Alipay’s space (run by Alibaba) – but it’s reported that Alibaba plans to spend more than 100 million yuan rewarding its users, too.
Chinese Team Wins The International
The Chinese WINGS team beat the US DC team at the TI6 (The International Dota 2 Championships) and won the highest prize of USD 9 million, which is also the highest prize in the history of eSports. Chinese teams have been doing well at the International Dota 2 Championships in the past years. At TI4 in 2014, Chinese teams took the first and the second places. And at TI5 in 2015, Chinese teams took 2nd-5th places. eSports has become a larger and larger business in China. In March, the General Administration of Sport of China announced the establishment of China Mobile eSports Industry League, and said that in 2015 China’s eSports market size would reach RMB 27 billion.
Pokemon Go Across Asia
Pokemon Go has officially arrived in Thailand, Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia. According to VentureBeat, several players are having to deal with shaky transmission signals but Niko Partner’s direct observations have been that the signals are fine. We have noticed that there are interesting differences in other countries without the base of Ingress (Niantic’s previous AR game) to build off of – for instance, we’ve observed that one street in Vietnam has nearly 20 PokeStops and almost no other PokeStops nearby in that city. And in Singapore, a large number of the PokeStops are located underground on the subway system.
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