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. 

Lisa Cosmas Hanson, Managing Partner for Niko Partners, will be at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the week of March 25th. Please email Lisa if you will be attending GDC and would like to set up a meeting.

Lisa moderated a strong panel on Chinese mobile games at SXSW "200 Million Reasons to Launch Your App in China" and you can check out some of the tweets at #apps4china. In fact, there are now probably 300 million smartphones in circulation so that title is already outdated. There was a lot of information on distributing across multiple mobile platforms at once, cracked phones, WeChat (which is something everyone needs to check out), and much more. 

Many sources agree that I'm MT is the #1 mobile game on iOS in China. The reason that I'm MT is so hot is that it is based on cartoon offshoot story from World of Warcraft, and the game itself is modeled after a Japanese online card game called Puzzle & Dragon. Remember that WoW's own initial success in China could partially be attributed to the widespread pirated distribution of the game Warcraft long before WoW ever launched. Even if WoW's popularity is waning in comparison to non-RPGs such as League of Legends, the Warcraft story is one that Chinese gamers love. 

China's Ministry of Industry and Info Tech (MIIT) says that Android had 86.4% market share of mobile OS in 2012, followed by iOS (8.6%), Symbian (2%), and Windows (1.2%). The MIIT is not happy about Google's Android having such control of the "technology roadmaps" for mobile devices.