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. 

A report by Super Data says that social gamers have fallen off significantly in the US recently. Niko Partners is seeing the same trend in the Chinese market, though the decline in China began last year. In our upcoming report, China's Online Games Market, we will present data that shows a decline in revenue of social games from 2011 to 2012, with a transfer of social gaming on PC to casual and social gaming on the mobile platform. However, there was still significant growth in the overall PC online games market in 2012 and we have a bullish forecast for 2013-2017 (stay tuned, as the report comes out at the end of April). In June we will publish our China's Mobile Games Market Report as well.  

A recent report by Qihoo360 shows a ranked list of provinces and their Internet speeds. China Unicom and China Telecom both operate from Shanghai, with one dominating the network going to the North and the other dominating the network going to the South. Most of the provincial capitals have fast Internet speeds, but many of the smaller cities do not. In some cases it is better to use connected PCs at Internet cafés than at home, and in some cases the mobile Internet is faster in the smaller cities than standard broadband would be. China's average broadband speed is relatively slow at 3.14 Mbps (megabits per second), according to the report. By comparison, the national average in Korea is 14.7 Mbps. The translation of the ranked list of provinces is found on Tech In Asia.

The city of Wuhan in China will hold its first College E-Sports League, which has been officially approved by the sports bureau of Hubei Province. The competition events will include DOTA, LOL, CF, and more. Undergrad, graduate and PhD students from 13 universities, including Wuhan University and Wuhan University of Technology, will apply for the event. The candidates can also apply for the Chinese E-Sports Athlete Certificate to get a China National Second-level Professional Athlete Certificate.