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. 

E3 is going on this week in LA but the focus, as expected, is consoles and console games. These have little importance in China and Asia. Niko Partners is attending the show and will glean information about PC online games, mobile trends, and movements of companies to and from Asia. We will report our learnings next week.  

As Niko Partners has reported in the past, hardcore webgames have taken market share from MMORPGs in China. These games are played in the browser rather than via client software installed on a local PC. In the US, we recognize Kabam and Kixeye as two of the leaders in such games. Chinese webgames are often one hit developed by a small unknown development studio. None of the popular webgames in China are imported, but many domestically developed webgames are exported. A recent government report said that of the 177 Chinese online games exported in 2012, 103 of them were webgames. A gamer does not need to go to an I-café to play webgames because the games can be played on most systems. 

Other differentiators with client-based games are that the longevity of a gamer in a game is much shorter in a webgame, and that the webgames are not as technically impressive as client-based games. Niko's data shows that the popular Chinese webgames have names that can be written in pinyin, of course, but for the most part do not have English titles. Here are some examples of 5 leading webgame titles:

Jin Liu, partner at Lotus China Fund, declared that mobile game development sector consolidation has begun in China. He assumes that 60,000 developers are employed in the mobile sector and that 12,000 of them will leave shortly because of consolidation, closures or restructuring. He says that there were few VC investments in this sector in the first half of 2013, yet implied that investment is still wise as his own fund may start to invest in Q3 this year. Niko Partners believes that the mobile games sector will experience strong growth in the coming years, and probably will have the sharpest growth rate of all the game segments.