A report on IDG News said that the eBox, China's hopeful in the global console market, will have a delayed market launch until sometime in mid-2011. The announcement of the eBox in 2010 caused a flurry of speculation (including by Niko Partners) that the long-standing ban on consoles in China might be overturned. A blog released the name of a title in development for the eBox, called Flyimal by a company called Mixamo. There are several "console alternatives" in development in China already, as previously written about by Niko. A few weeks ago we saw a news item stating that Nintendo's 3DS handheld will be released in China as an iQue product, but that is not surprising considering that iQue has released Chinese versions of all of Nintendo's handheld devices over the past few years. iQue is 50% owned by Nintendo.

China's General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) hosted it's annual China Game Publishers Association conference and meeting this week. At the meeting Vice Director Sun Shoushan announced 2010 revenues for China's online games sector of 32.37 billion RMB. At 2010 rates of 6.75 RMB/dollar, used by Niko when we wrote our revised forecast for 2010 in September, that is $4.9 billion. Niko had forecast $4.4 billion for the year for online game services revenue only. It is unclear by the GAPP announcement what they included in their figure of 32.37 billion RMB. If it is only online game services revenue, the market outperformed Niko's estimate and had a stronger second half of the year than expected. We will not know the real figure until the online game operators release their 2010 year end results over the next few weeks.

According to the President of Shanda, the company is in development of a game for Microsoft's Xbox. Over the past several years many console developers have used Chinese outsourcing studios for art, programming, Q/A and other pieces of console game development in an effort to reduce the very high development costs of console games. If Shanda has developed this Xbox game entirely, that will mark a notable milestone in Chinese game development.