Tencent Consortium Acquires Supercell

E3 2016

Niko staff combed the halls of E3 2016 to see how Chinese firms would participate and what they would choose to reveal in this setting. Seventeen Chinese companies attended E3 this year, compared to 16 in 2015 and five in 2014. The list includes NetEase, Perfect World, Gamedo Co., Locojoy, MobileFish Co., Tencent (who didn’t have a booth or a public presence, just a meeting room), Virtuos, Suishouwan, HTC and more.

NetEase hosted a conference at the JW Marriott next to the convention center and unveiled upcoming games, including RTS mobile game Evercraft and MMOG Great Voyage. They also highlighted their entry into the VR field with Twilight Pioneers, which will be one of the first games to launch on Google’s mobile VR platform. NetEase is also getting more into the IP space for games, like working on a mobile MMORPG/FPS based on Terminator 2.

Perfect World presented two mobile action games (“Quan Min Da Zhu Zai” and “Zhen. San Guo Wu Shuang”). Both of these games are horizontal scrolling action/fighting mobile games. “Quan Min Da Zhu Zai” has an oriental fantasy theme with online literature IP and the other is self-developed by Perfect World and supervised by Koei, a Japanese game company.

E3’s attendance was down 3.6% from E3 2015. The future of E3 is uncertain as large companies like EA, Activision and Tencent opted out of having a presence on the showroom floor this year.

JD.com’s Annual Shopping Carnival

JD.com just had its annual shopping carnival JD 618 (the pronunciation of 6-1-8 sounds like “you will be rich” in Mandarin), which took place from June 1st to June 20th. During the period, JD received more than 100 million orders. On June 18th when the shopping carnival is at its peak, 24 million orders were made on that day with a 60% YoY growth, and 85% of the orders were made on mobile devices, 2.2x the number of the previous year on that same day. Also, the number of new users using Wechat and QQ Mobile to make orders was 2.6x the same day of the previous year, which shows the great power and potential behind the collaboration of mobile social network and e-commerce. This is similar to the Singles Day ecommerce bonanza that led Alibaba to generate $14.3 billion in sales on 11/11/15.

Tencent Consortium Acquires Supercell

It has been officially announced that a consortium established by Tencent will acquire a majority stake in Supercell, the company behind Clash of Clans, from SoftBank. It will value Supercell at $10.2 billion and the deal will close in the third quarter of this year. SoftBank will no longer hold any shares in Supercell but every Supercell employee will become an equity shareholder in Supercell and will be in a long-term incentive plan to sell their vested shares back to Tencent.

Vietnam’s Self-Organized Gaming Community Events

In response to recent string of offline events hosted by VNG for Thien Long Bat Bo 3D, a mobile 3D MMORPG, the community has taken upon themselves to organize offline events, even in the remote areas that were beyond VNG’s reach. In addition to the recent tournament, these events keep the community engaged as VNG prepares to roll out the game’s next expansion pack.

Niko Partners on Twitter

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