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. 

Perfect World continues on its quest for global market share. Most recently the company announced that it has formed a Malaysian subsidiary that began operations last Friday. Niko Partners will release our 2012 Southeast Asian Games Market Regional Report this week, including information on Malaysia and five other Southeast Asian markets. 

Perfect World's CEO projected that 30% of Perfect World's 2012 revenue will come from overseas markets, by far the largest international sales ratio of any Chinese online games operator. Perfect World also expanded its office space in Redwood Shores, California earlier this year. 

Tencent's Weixin (known as "We Chat" outside of China) is definitely an impressive mobile communications tool - in our opinion it has more functionality that other communications tools we've seen (check it out). Tencent announced that it will launch a mobile games channel in Weixin soon. Weixin has 200 million users already, according to this article. Both internally developed and third party games will be available. This potentially could give a big boost to the already fast-rising Chinese mobile games market. 

YY is a gamer chat tool that has widespread use in China, and is in the same corporate lineage as Duowan. It generates most of its revenue from virtual economy transactions in webgames on its webgames platform. The company went public on NASDAQ last week and had a good start to its public trading. YY previously was the "only" chat tool to use for large online game battles in games such as ZT Online, but these days most online game operators offer their own tools in direct competition to YY. YY is still generally regarded as the most popular team chat tool for online games - it has 400 million users worldwide, 70 million active users as of August, and 10 million PCUs in August.