Chinese Internet operator and game publisher Tencent expects explosive growth in the Chinese mobile games market, and predicts the strongest revenues to come from titles in the traditional RPG, FPS and RTS genres.
“In 2014 many Chinese phone manufacturers will release very cheap models,” said Tencent Games production executive Steve Gray during the Tencent Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week. “They will sell 300 or 400 million handsets. That’s a lot of new users. A very high percentage of them will play games.”
According to Gray, domestic sales figures from the publisher’s portfolio of mobile games reveal players progressing from pick-up-and-play games towards more complex, hardcore titles.
“Particularly in the Chinese market, but it’s indicative of the whole world, people come in to play really simple games; but what we find is that people then start to play more complicated games,” said Gray. “Simple games do monetise, but the deeper games that people play for longer periods have more options for monetisation.”
China’s Tencent, the world’s third largest Internet company behind Google and Amazon, also has stakes some of gaming’s biggest companies, including League of Legends developer Riot Games (which Tencent acquired in 2011) as well as game and technology developer Epic Games (Tencent paid US$330 million for a 40 per cent stake in the company in 2012).
Last November Tencent announced that the company’s Weixin mobile messaging app in China (WeChat overseas) had registered over 570 million game downloads since launching the LinkLink social game platform via Weixin three months earlier.
InsideGamesAsia.biz is an official Game Developers Conference 2014 media partner.
