Weekly Twitter Posts
NetEase's penalty for operating WoW w/o approval will likely occur by 1/19, the start of GAPP's annual game industry conf http://tiny.cc/Wnkg7 7:00 PM Jan 8th from web
Chinese gamers have been paying to play WoW since 9/09 even tho GAPP told
NetEase to cease ops. New reg expected soon http://tiny.cc/OT5AH
7:52 PM Jan 6th
from web
As Niko predicted, China's Min of Culture is increasing its scrutiny of SNS games, such as Happy Farm and its clones http://tiny.cc/rDyj8 5 7 PM Dec 18th from web
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Welcome to Niko News, just part of the market intelligence experience offered to help you better understand the thriving video game market of China.
Niko
Partners is the premier provider of market intelligence and custom
research services on China's video game industry. There are more than 60 million Chinese gamers eager to play hit titles on systems with the
latest technologies. With Niko Partners market intelligence services,
you can get to know these gamers, find Chinese partners, and use our
actionable market data to build and execute your strategic plan.
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More Regulatory Changes - Even for Domestic Developers
The GAPP recently announced that it is considering
altering the existing procedure for new domestic game approval by eliminating
the local press and publications agencies from the process. Until now a game
would be submitted to a local press and publications agency in a province or
city near the developer, and then it would escalate to the central government
GAPP. This may change to require all games to go directly through the central
GAPP and therefore increase waiting periods for publication licenses while also
streamlining the regulatory authority. There has been a lot of regulatory
change in the past four months as well as a heightened turf war between the GAPP and
Ministry of Culture (MoC).
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Internet Café Crackdown Continues
A Shenzhen local newspaper
reported that the Shenzhen government has shut down 6,893 illegal i-cafes and
confiscated over 50,000 computers since May, 2009. There has been a nationwide
crackdown on i-cafés that operate without a license, primarily due to the
health and safety hazards for patrons. The number of legally operated i-cafés
stands at approximately 140,000. Niko estimates that there are roughly
20-30,000 illegally operating cafés with 30 or more PCs, but countless others
with only a handful of PCs. There is an additional segment of cafés that offer
broadband access to patrons who bring in their own laptops, but those are not
classified the same as i-cafés that provide access to the Internet via the
café's PC hardware for a fee.
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VC interest in SNS game developers expands to China
In the US, where
intellectual property rights actually mean something, it makes sense for some
of the social game developers such as Zynga to deserve large financial
valuations. In China however, Niko is questioning the reasoning for similar VC
investments into Chinese social game makers. Chinese social games are copied
easily and often, and most of the leading social networking sites have versions
of the same game on them. It is different than in the US where Facebook reigns
mighty, because in China there are several leading SNS so game developers would
need to optimize their games for each one of them. For these reasons
and others, no logical exit strategy presents itself in an obvious manner quite
yet.
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