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. 

Vietnam's government is concerned that there may be a flood of illegal online games reaching Vietnamese PCs from countries such as China and South Korea. The country says that only domestically owned online game operators (need not be 100% domestically owned) may operate online games there. However, millions of gamers access games via servers hosted internationally, and pay for these games using prepaid cards. One threat that is being discussed is the elimination of prepaid cards that enable access to servers located outside of Vietnam. Niko will follow this issue and we will publish our 2012 Southeast Asian Games Market Regional Report in November.  

Valve licensed DOTA 2 to Perfect World in mainland China this week. This is intriguing mostly because of the enormous popularity of DOTA throughout Asia, and the joy that was felt in Asia when Valve announced that DOTA 2 would not require a paid download but that it would be a F2P game. In a region where paying for games has been historically reserved for 10% of gamers at the most, Southeast Asia has embraced the DOTA franchise and we are currently in process of collecting information regarding the success thus far of DOTA 2 in SEA. Meanwhile, Perfect World lends a strong operator reputation to the game for release in mainland China, yet the release date is still unknown.  

NetEase is fully ensconced in the Chinese microblogging world, with stated users of 260 million (though some may be duplicates of themselves). This poses competition to Sina weibo and Tencent weibo, the two leading microblogging sites in China. As NetEase is primarily an online games operator, this helps the company expand into new markets and access a different segment of its prospective market than it may have with its traditional games, such as Fantasy Westward Journey or Blizzard's World of Warcraft.