THQ's CEO Brian Farrell gave a talk at Cloud Gaming USA recently and his comments on the future of consoles are in line with the business model that would be required for success in China and other emerging markets rife with packaged game piracy. He says that the games will not be distributed via disk but will be served in the cloud. This will both bring down the cost of the hardware and prevent piracy. We await the launch of the Chinese console iSec, now rumored to have a further delayed launch until at least the end of this year. Once it launches we can see what business model may be appropriate for that market where consoles have been banned for a decade. Niko has forecast that once consoles are available for legal sale, games will be distributed by online game operators in the same manner as PC online games.

In Niko's upcoming Six-Month Update Report on China's games market we include analysis from our recent August 2011 survey on 500 smartphone owners. We learned from that survey that owners frequently use many app stores, not just those from the carriers or other official channels. This article from Penn-Olson lays out some of the popular ones for you nicely. 

An interesting infographic by Ogilvy Asia regarding the popularity of Facebook in Asia.