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. 

GDC 2013 was action packed. We noticed that the attendees skewed older than in past years, and many appeared to be executives rather than all developers. It seems that the rest of the world has finally embraced F2P ("freemium") games, but it seems like such old news to us Asiaphiles. 

There were plenty of Asian companies in attendance and plenty of attendees wanting to know about Asia. Hot topics about the Chinese market included mobile games, a departure from MMORPGs, possible strategic investments by publicly traded online game operators, cool chat technologies such as WeChat and KakaoTalk, and the known lack of console gaming in the Asia region. In one GDC talk, PopCap's James Gwertzman expounded on how PvZ benefited from piracy and counterfeit goods, and Rovio has sung a similar tune with what it credits for its success in China with Angry Birds.

Completely unrelated to China (except that Hawken has been licensed to KongZhong and was the demo game used) was the very awesome Oculus Rift virtual reality dev headset.

We are working on data analytics to cover iOS and Android smartphone games in China, and we will publish our Chinese Mobile Games Market report in June.

Umeng has the most comprehensive set of mobile analytics in China. The company says that at the end of 2012 there were 85 million active iOS users and 160 million active Android users in China. We believe that currently there are 300 million total smartphone users there, and by the end of 2013 there could be as many as 500 million if the current sales trend continues. To that end, if the ratio holds up, there would be 173 million active iOS users, mostly using (and playing games on) on Apple iPhones and some of who would instead be using iPad. The rest get distributed among the myriad Android devices.  

Real name registration has been a looming cloud over the Chinese online games world for several years. It has taken a long while to implement the process of requiring that all users register with their real names. The State Council issued a memorandum called the State Council Plan for Organizational Reform and Functional Transitions, including item #13 that requires three ministries to finish implementing the real name registration system by the end of June 2014. Most of the publicly traded online game operators already adhere to the system as they were asked to be early adopters by the MIIT years ago.

Tencent ultimately has won the legal battle of Qihoo 360's 2012 lawsuit that accused the industry giant of monopolistic practices. The court found in favor of Tencent and ordered Qihoo 360 to pay $125,000 in legal damages.