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. 

Blizzard Entertainment announced it has licensed its new cross-platform strategy card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft to NetEase. The license is for 3 years, and they are in process of applying for content approval to begin beta testing. 

Tencent has been spreading the good word about its success this week. The CEO Zhiping Liu said that 26 apps on Tencent's platform earn more than 10 millin RMB monthly, and WeChat has more than 70 million overseas users. He also said that after merely 3 years of operation, in 2013, developers publishing to Tencent's platform have received collectively 3 billion RMB in rev share, while it took Tencent 8 years to get to annual revenue of 3 billion RMB. Meanwhile, VP Jiaxin Peng reports that as of April 2013 there were 80,000 developers on Tencent's platform and that they had developed 40,000 games which led to more than 100,000 RMB in monthly revenue, a 50% increase over the same time in 2012. 

Online video continues to expand in mainland China. Baidu's online video subsidiary iQiyi is nearly done with the technical integration effort with recently acquired P2P video service provider PPS (PPStream). iQiyi is pursuing a PC strategy of providing ad-supported free content to users. This is from a release by Tan Xing, CTO of Baidu, as reported in Marbridge Daily.  

Chinese developer Dream² is currently working on a browser-based edition of the massively multiplayer online role-playing franchise Ragnarok Online, MMO Culturereports.