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Everything you need to know this week about the games market in Asia
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Every week, our analysts review dozens of news sources, from multiple countries, in multiple languages. From this, we give you the stories that are most important, and the analysis to tell you why.
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GamesCom in Europe passed China Joy and Tokyo Games Show to become the largest game conference in the world, with 275,000 people attending in the third week of August. China's Ministry of Commerce guided a "China team" to the show in order to man a Chinese culture and trade exhibition there. GamesCom was right on the heels of China Joy so not many Chinese game announcements came out of the show, but Tencent did announce a highly-publicized statement that it will operate a 3D online MOBA F2P game by Hi-Rez called SMITE in the rest of the world but dubbed Shen Zhi Hao Jie, which translates to Calamity of the Gods. The game will launch in October according to the statement.
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Many Chinese PC online game operators have entered the mobile game platform and distribution segment in effort to boost their mobile games business in mainland China. Shanda had already announced that it would self-publish an in-house developed mobile game released this year, but this week the company also announced the launch of "G-Home", a mobile game platform, along with 36 new mobile games in the pipeline. So far the mobile games space in China is dominated by far smaller companies than Shanda, with the exception of Tencent which has a strong mobile market share.
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Tencent's WeChat is hot hot hot and NetEase recently announced a competing mobile IM service called "Yi Xin", launched jointly with China Telecom. The company says that Yi Xin achieved more than 1 million downloads within 24 hours of release. According to the Beijing Times as relayed by Marbridge Daily, in the app's first day of release, users created over 20,000 friend groups, uploaded 300,000 photos to their photo walls, sent over 1 mln free SMSs, and left over 400,000 voice messages.
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It is a momentous time as Renren decided to shutter Happy Farm, one of the original social games that launched a social gaming phenomenon in China. Some people still claim that Zynga copied Happy Farm when it launched Farmville, though that is not confirmed. Happy Farm was launched in 2009 and turned "stealing vegetables" into a household phrase.
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ABOUT NIKO
Niko News is just one part of the strategy and expertise offered by Niko Partners to help our clients better understand and successfully navigate the thriving games markets of China and Southeast Asia.
Niko Partners is the leading provider of market intelligence, custom research, and consulting services focused on the games industries in China and Southeast Asia. Since 2003 we have provided critical information to the world's leading game publishers, developers, hardware makers, and game service providers as well as to government policymakers, trade associations, and institutional investors.
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