Mobile games industry news (w/e 27 July 2013)

hello welcome to pocket gamer.bizizz Roundup of the week for the week ending the 26th of July 2013. um been a pretty interesting week uh for me at least on my gaming off his team um so I've been in China in Shanghai this week um for the China Joy conference um so my news focus is pretty skewed towards China um all about China this week in the general news obviously we hit the kind of a financial uh Q2 figures so um a few interesting Trends I mean Trends have been going for a while um EA continues to do pretty well on its certainly on its digital side um announced that last year they their entire daily active users was about 5 million and now it has 5.4 Million Just For The Simpsons game so uh pretty pretty bullish with EA um pretty much saying same with Gameloft um double digit kind of increases again kind of year year on year financials um

but as we actually covered this year this year this week on the site um despicables me has been their kind of big breakout hit um over the last uh kind of month or so so obviously the tying game I'm doing well for them um not doing so well but again maybe not so surprisingly Zynga which is a at the QT sales down 31 um and is losing losing users at a rapid rate of knots again maybe not surprising it's moved you know from a Facebook kind of a focused business to a mobile Focus business which is much harder um to to get users so unfortunately sales are going down so it's suggesting that it's not monetizing these the mobile users um particularly well either um but we'll wait to see obviously a work in progress with the new CEO place but uh let's look a bit more on China so China Joy is um is a combination of a consumer uh kind of event which is the five massive Halls full of uh Chinese people looking at a million PC games to some mobile stuff as well and a kind of crazy as you might

imagine and then it has like a developer size it has like a GDC type uh kind of conference uh well various tracks over the three days has been you know kind of five or six different tracks some of them mobile some social some focusing on different things and it's been interesting so the the Chinese uh gaming Market is still pretty focused on on online pc uh free-to-play games and that's kind of where the bulk of of the revenues at least I'll probably about 75 but we're seeing a big a big translation um as we've seen everywhere around the world really I'm going to go into Mobile quality mobile devices is booming um people got them all the time so you're having you know much higher kind of uh kind of daily sessions a much higher kind of game gameplay average gameplay kind of lengths um so the figures came out um from the Chinese uh games industry this week that says the mobile industry now it's worth it in the first half of this year was worth about 400 million dollars and grew expected last year at 100 um so it was a pretty explosive growth

there um but some people seem to be suggesting in the industry that those figures are quite lowball so some people are even suggesting it could be as high as like two billion dollars uh interesting mobile Revenue this year um the moment mobile is about seven seven point five percent of the overall Chinese games Market um a lot of people are looking to see that easily go go past 10 by the end of the year and just kind of sitting in uh some of these sessions and kind of trying to get a feel of kind of what the Chinese mobile game developers are thinking it was quite interesting it was you kind of Imagine in such a booming Market in the west we'd all be Pat ourselves on the back and saying well all this growth isn't everything amazing like Chinese were much more um uh I mean almost almost pessimistic something really it's quite quite surprising a lot of them have seen their entire business model switch from online pc going over to mobile which they're finding I think quite um very different kind of operations very different kind of uh kind of way they're kind of giving games to people or kind of trying to get people to play games and the Chinese market in the west is obviously very

focused with Google Play and we have the Apple App Store that's pretty much pretty much it in terms of how you distribute your games in China completely different so obviously there's no Google Play for starters iOS yes that is theirs it's still some piracy in terms of um IOS games but most of the uh Hardware growth is come from Android so Android is is the massive majority of the market and as China continues to get more smartphones if they'll be on the Android side of things um and so that means Carriage is very strong so the three three major Chinese carriers uh Chinese mobile Chinese Telecom and Chinese Unicom they're pretty much the third of the market so um they have very good one-click operated billing that's very very seamless um so operators will play a much stronger part in Chinese games Market going forward something that they do in the west and also on Android you're seeing a lot of um there's a kind of platform so there's like 10 cent obviously very big online game developer and doing some mobile games and has WeChat which is its big messaging system 300 million Chinese people use it they're rolling games into that so that'd be like a people are

predicted predicting a lot of arguments whether it's going to be like a cacao type type impact where cacao was a Korean messaging kind of network that completely took over the the Korean games Market people suggesting probably won't be as fast as that but clearly that's gonna have a big impact from tencent and then you have kind of other distribution platform so there's a 360 which is actually um a antivirus and it's hot it isn't like antivirus software but it has very massive web portal and it has um it's kind of uh um has a mobile kind of um utilities antivirus utilences which they can then use as a platform and um we were talking to all right one one uh Chinese publisher uh Coco China which is going to deal with uh with Gameloft for s48's new racing game which is an 800 Meg download which is clearly Chinese people are not gonna do over there because I just don't have that free free data so yeah the distribution model for that is much more that you're downloading it via your PC and then side loading it onto Android device so something like 360 is is ideal for that kind of thing going forward in the scene is probably one of the biggest platforms if not the at the

moment the biggest kind of this distributor of Android games there's plenty of other ones there so a big deal happened a couple weeks ago um but Badoo which is the Chinese Google it's been about two billion dollars buying uh 91 Wireless which is again a very big set of uh Android App Stores uh drive a lot of Revenue drive a lot of Revenue and downloads um so we're seeing a contraction they used to be used to be said there was like 400 app stores in China and you had to kind of deal with them all that's kind of seeing Contracting quite quickly maybe people are saying there's maybe 40 kind of key distribution points now um so I guess we're seeing as we've seen consolidation in in distribution that's kind of then knocking they're not going to affect consolidation in developers because there's only so many developers those channels want to talk to as they hit they kind of like focusing on the the bigger kind of kind of companies um there's all kind of quite a lot of change in lots of different levels so be fascinating I guess to see in the next six months how it all pans out um so on the bottom level we'll be seeing well let's see thousands of video developers starting up as we're seeing all around the world to make mobile

games in China they could have just like what's happening so quickly I think they're kind of feeling kind of quite compressed that they they're kind of don't have the scale to get all these app stores they don't have like an obvious uh app store or Google play so they can kind of get very quick visibility with a feature and then go Global so I think it's kind of the small middle ranking guys that we're finding finding it kind of quite quite pressurizing I guess that's where some of the pessimism is coming from um but but we'll see it's been a it's been a fascinating trip and I'm sure we'll be back in China again to find out much more about it see you next week