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. 

PC offline (or single player) games get very little public exposure in China because nearly all that are played are downloaded illegally or purchased from a pirate software store. The number of legitimate units of PC games sold in China sometimes can reach as "high" as 750,000 in a year. For all titles. 

However, one franchise has bucked that trend consistently, and that is the Chinese Paladin series, aka PAL Chinese. The current version is PAL 5 and the PAL 5 Prequel, and it is reported that more than 2 million units have been sold of those titles. Even PAL 4, which was considered a hit, sold only 350,000 in the first few months of its release. There is an online component to the PAL games now, but the key point here is that a PC offline game that is approved for sale in China can actually make money. The PAL games benefit in past years has been that the release in China is the same as the release in Taiwan and elsewhere, eliminating the window of opportunity for pirates to sell their illegal copies before the legitimate version is available in mainland China.  

We recently conducted a mini-survey regarding the usage of online video, and we plan to use the results along with other information in an upcoming bulletin on the topic. In our data we learned that among our sample, the leading online video sites are Youku, Tudou and iQiyi, in that order. Most people prefer to watch videos in the browser on their own PC (desktop or laptop), yet many people say their primary viewing time is during their commute to work on a mobile device. We will disclose more in our upcoming bulletin. 

China's largest online games operator, Tencent, stated that its online games revenue was $1.2 billion in Q1, up 19.3% from Q4 2012 thanks mostly to the continued popularity of their hit MMO non-RPG games Dungeon and Fighter, Cross Fire and League of Legends. In our April "China's Online Games Market" report we asserted that Tencent held 37% market share in 2012. If we assume that share still holds in Q1, then the total market would be $3.24 billion. (Results of the other major operators were also positive.) Our forecast for 2013 domestic online games revenue is $11.9 billion. At this rate, it may turn out that our forecast is conservative even though it would have added more than $2 billion to the already large market size of $9.3 billion achieved in 2012.