Perfect World Entertainment, the US and European subsidiary of the Chinese video game developer, has just named John Young VP of business development and corporate communication.
Formerly Financial Analyst for EA, Publisher for Gazillion Entertainment, Young is already a free-to-play veteran. His responsibilities among the Chinese company will include building new partnership and expand Perfect World’s western presence, more particularly for games like Star Trek Online and Champions Online.
“I believe Perfect World Entertainment is leading a new generation of Free-to-Play online games” said Young, while Perfect World CEO Alan Chen was “delighted that John has joined [them]”
Source: Gamasutra
Just a few days after a previous announcement of a partnership with Huawei to bring its Mobage gaming platform in China, the Japanese social gaming company has just formed a partnership with Qihoo360, the largest security software publisher of the country.
Through this partnership, Qihoo users will be able to access a Mobage China corner, in which Mobage China for Android can be downloaded. DeNA plans to capitalize on Qihoo 360’s 400 million active users to grow its user base.
And in an effort to create an user experience as frictionless as possible, Qihoo users will also be able to log onto the Mobage China platform with their existing IDs.
After Baidu, Alibaba, Kaixin and NetDragon, are they going to stop someday ?
Source: Penn Olson
iResearch, a consulting firm on China’s internet industry, recently released a research on China Mobile Payment. Though not directly talking about video games, the relationship between gaming and alternative payment methods being as they are, I believed I had to share this news.
Now here’s what we could call an explosive growth: 190 million Chinese mobile users spent 48.14 billion Yuan (~5.69 billion EUR) in 2011, which account for an impressive 149.1% increase. If SMS payment follows this trend, it could reach more than 200 billion Yuan by 2013.
The overall Internet economy has huge demands for mobile payments.
Although the main reasons behind this exponential growth are the ever so popular m-commerce (+400% in the first three quarters of 2011) and the rise of proximity commerce, it will drive sales in all the Chinese e-commerce ecosystem: popularization of high-end mobile device and development of new communication technologies (3G, 4G and NFC as the most significant ones), coupled with an almost frictionless payment process will bring extensive e-wallets in almost every chinese youth pocket.
SMS payment could then prove to be the ultimate payment method for game publishers and distributors targeting China youth. Let me remind you that consoles are still unavailable in China (apart from black markets), so the only places chinese gamers can devote themselves to their passion are their PCs (which is how Tencent boomed in early 2000s) and their mobile phones. Even more on their smartphones with the appearance of contenders like DeNA signing partnerships with key mobile device manufacturers in China.
DeNA, the mobile social gaming giant from Japan, has just set a new landmark onto Chinese territory by signing a new agreement that will allow its Mobage mobile gaming platform available on Huawei handsets in the Middle Kingdom.
This announcement comes just a few weeks after a previous one seeing the opening of a Mobage section in Baidu’s Yi Store. Both Baidu’s Yi Store and Huawei HiSpace are third-party app stores for Android devices, both alternatives to the official Android Market, sadly non-existant in China. Mobage’s presence on these marketplaces will increase the consumption of Moba-coins, the virtual currency in place in all of DeNA’s games.
Seeing those two important moves just a few weeks apart, there’s no doubt we will see yet other important announcement before the end of the fiscal year.
Source: DeNA to Bring Mobage Social Games to Huawei Smartphones in China
