Inside Social Games, owner of the AppData tracking software, says that there are fewer than 15 million Chinese speaking Facebook gamers in the world, out of a total of 675 million Facebook gamers. There are several Chinese language games on Facebook, and recently Facebook stated that 5 of their top 50 games in all languages are Chinese games. The #1 Chinese language game based on Monthly Active Users (MAU), with 4.8 million, is Chinese FarmVille (Zynga), though that game has fewer Daily Active Users (DAU), with 408,000, than the other four games in the Top 5: Happy Fish Bowl, Happy Farm, Little War, and Chinese Boss Vegas. Facebook is blocked in China but there are many other countries where Chinese is widely spoken, such as the US, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan (officially part of China, but following their own censorship rules.) We foresee that Chinese games will flourish on Facebook even without the company entering the mainland Chinese market.

Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike has been a huge success since its recent launch, and Activision has announced plans to launch it in China using the microtransactions model. This model is used by the majority of online games in China. COD probably could support the time-based model in China if Activision opted for that, but the F2P microtransactions model is probably the wiser bet. Of course the game needs to get past the GAPP and MOC approval systems first.

Lineage, one of the earliest online games, pioneered by NCSoft of Korea, will shut down service in North America on June 29^th. NCSoft did not state why, but the game is 10 years old and maybe the company needs to focus efforts on new games for this market and the rest of the world. Chinese and Korean online game operators are pushing their way into global markets, and North American gamers are eager for great online games apart from the simpler games they find on social networking services and casual game portals.

Niko Partners released our 9^th China's Games Industry Annual Review & Forecast Report on April 30th. The 78-page report is chock full of data and analysis we wrote based on our proprietary data collection and market model. After conducting more than 1,200 surveys and interviews in 10 cities and gathering 70,000+ points of data, we were able to compile this important market intelligence study that is a must-read for any company serious about success in China's games market or related fields of business.

Visit the research store on www.nikopartners.com or contact evan@nikopartners.com to purchase.