Going to China Joy? Check out the two Niko speakers presenting at the show! Ms. Li Jun will speak at CGOC 7/31, and Mr. Xiaofeng Zeng will be a panelist in the media forum at CGBC on 7/29.

Unity Technologies has emerged as a leader in game development tools for online games, and the Unity platform is already quite popular among Chinese development studios. The company's statement that 40% of their users will be China-based within 18 months is bold indeed. Unity stated that 12,000 Chinese developers already use their platform. There are several hundred online game publishers, big and small, in China today plus at least 1,000 outsourced development studios that have at least one team of developers. Conservatively assuming Unity's user base of 500,000 stayed totally constant for those 18 months, by our estimates they will need to engage practically every developer in China to hit their goal. Then again, perhaps our estimates of 200,000-300,000 (including outsourcing and in-house personnel) total game developers are too low. Some companies we surveyed for our upcoming Chinese Game Development Studios Report and Directory, to be published next week in association with CGOC in time for China Joy, claim that there are as many as 500,000-600,000 development personnel in China, while others we surveyed think there are merely tens of thousands. 

Payback is tough, as they say. Lenovo has held the #1 spot among PC vendors in Asia-Pacific for many years, and the companies that follow behind include Dell, HP, and others. According to IDC, last quarter Lenovo was #1 with 22% share, while Acer climbed to #2 with 11.4% share. The great twist in this is that Lenovo got started in PCs in the early 90's under the moniker Legend Computer by first distributing AST products, then after bluntly dropping AST company it picked up Acer and served as Acer's distributor in China. After learning about PCs by watching Acer, Legend subsequently dropped that brand too and launched it's own brand of Legend computers. The art of patience may pay off for Acer to gain retribution if it can continue to build market share against Lenovo. Then again, Lenovo did buy IBM's PC division a few years back so we don't really see a credible threat of Acer overtaking the giant in Asia.

Apple need look only as far as Vietnam to see a glimpse of what may be when consumers are offered more choices in tablets. Vietnamese consumers are evidently overwhelmed by nearly 30 models of tablets with a huge range in prices, though according to VietNamNet Bridge, all the products seem to be the same. One thing the non-Apple brands do not have is the App Store with plenty of games to choose from. Apple announced this week that China was a main contributor for the company's best quarter ever, and that international markets comprised 62% of quarterly revenue led by Europe, then Asia/Pacific, then Japan. We've been keeping an eye on Apple in China with relation to gaming on their mobile devices.  

Techrice gives a great account of Sina Weibo's important new Game Center and Virtual Currency. Rather than restate everything written, you should click on the link and read it yourself. Sina Weibo, with more than 140 million users, is a microblogging service that is a serious contender to disrupt the social gaming paradigm that has only evolved over the past 18-24 months in China.