Niko News is a filter of the most important news items and bits of information concerning the games markets of China and Southeast Asia uncovered by Niko each week. Our multilingual analysts review dozens of news sources from several countries, and as a team Niko reduces the long list of articles to 3-4 "must read" items for you. We then provide our Niko analysis to these items, making them relevant and highlighting the importance for the market. This service is one of the many ways we help distill the confusing, conflicting information about the games markets of Asia for our clients and readers. 

League of Legends is very popular in SE Asia (as well as other regions), and gamers have endured usage via remote servers in the English language just for the chance to be able to play. Now LOL is live in Thailand, in Thai, on servers based in the country itself. The choice of Thailand probably came from the fact that there are so many avid advanced casual, hard-core gamers in that country, and that it is among the most active gaming markets in SEA. Garena secured the license to operate LOL and employed rigorous localization to get the game ready for that market. Niko's 2012 SEA report will be published in November, and we are confident that by then there will be more than 100,000 registered users, as there already are per some conservative statistics.  

CCTV has taken interest in webgames, deeming them more important than MMORPGs for revenue generation and as a vehicle to export Chinese culture abroad. CCTV produces TV shows, and has focused recent efforts on shows regarding themes of some popular domestically developed webgames. An article in China Game said that CCTV promoted the shows at Gamescom.  

A report issued by Flurry says that China has the second highest number of android and iOS million active users at 128 million, behind the US number of 165 million. China's growth rate far exceeds the US, though. The data may be misleading, because as Niko has noted in past posts and our China Mobile Games Report, many Chinese people own more than one smart phone. We estimated the number of Chinese smartphone users to be roughly half of the Flurry data, and that the total number of mobile gamers in China is roughly 192 million in 2012. 

We thought it worth mentioning that the Chinese government has decided that China will have 100 globally influential brands by 2015. Perhaps some of these will be online games developed in China by Chinese games companies?