Jury to Decide Owner of Dota
According to Ars Tecnhica, “Defense of the Ancient’s path from an ultra-popular Warcraft III mod to the core of Valve’s ultra-popular MOBA, Dota 2, is a long and confusing saga. Now, two developers working on their own mobile versions of Dota are arguing in court that Valve didn’t actually acquire a legitimate, enforceable copyright that encompasses the entirety of Dota’s development history. This question now seems set to go to a jury.” As the article points out – if Valve’s claim to Dota is deemed invalid, we may see many spin-offs in the very near future.
As a sidenote, Dota and Dota2 are wildly popular in China and throughout Asia, and are known as low-cost, high quality, competitive games that are perfect for esports competition. Surely some of the spin-offs would target Chinese and other Asian gamers.
Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1 Billion for a Talking Cat?
Chinese industrial firms are buying up Western game companies, despite having no pre-existing ties to the game industry. A recent Bloomberg feature dives into the topic on why this is happening – for example, Jagex (developers of Runescape) being bought by a Chinese mining firm and Splash Damage (developers of Brink) being purchased by a Chinese company that primarily sells poultry.
“You can buy profit,” investment banker Affan Butt told Bloomberg, suggesting that Chinese investors are much more concerned about seeing continual profits than investors in other markets.
Niko Partners adds that one other reason could be that game companies have very high value in China, and by industrial firms purchasing them they can likely raise their Chinese valuation based on the shift to digital games in the corporate line of business.
Esports School in the Philippines
The University of Visayas New School (UVNS) announced recently that they are offering an Esports Gaming course for high school students. They’re offering core subjects on Theories, Mechanics, Strategies and Game Awareness as well as components of game design, branding, shout casting and entrepreneurship.
Many American universities have incorporated esports into their curriculum offering and as basis for a scholarship, yet not many high schools have done so.
Niko Partner’s PC Online Gaming Report & E3
Today Niko Partners published our first companion report to our recent China’s Digital Games Market Data Report (April 2017). There are five Topic Reports planned for quick successive release, each of which is intended as a “chapter” extension of the Market Data Report. Today’s report is Chinese PC Online Gaming. More information will be emailed soon, clients get the report today, and it is available for sale now. Each topic report is $2,000 and the Market Data Report is $4,000.
Niko Partners will also attend E3 in Los Angeles. If you would like to scheduling a meeting with one of us, please contact us.
Destiny 2 Coming to Blizzard’s Platform
Bungie’s Destiny 2 PC version will be coming exclusively to Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net platform. To date, Battle.net has only operated Blizzard’s own games including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Overwatch, Diablo and Hearthstone. While Blizzard has not stated that this means they are opening up the platform to other third-party games, it is a shift Blizzard and may make Blizzard a stronger competitor to Valve’s Steam, GOG Galaxy and other online storefronts.
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