China isn’t going to come up with a big blockbuster game like “Angry Birds” any time soon. That’s the view of the chairman of China’s largest mobile games business.
“Our games developers don’t dream big enough, and there’s still not enough creativity. Also, there isn’t sufficient intellectual property protection so someone who has a great idea dares not put it out there in case it gets copied,” says Zhang Lijun, who heads China Mobile Games and Entertainment Group.
Zhang describes the fast-growing market as full of challenges. Apart from counterfeits, he says so-called “prison-breaking” is also rampant – whereby players dodge having to pay for games by cracking password-protected barriers on platforms.
Despite all this, the sheer size of the Chinese market – with 191m people playing games on their mobiles phones according to China’s iiMedia Research Group – makes it attractive.
Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company behind Angry Bird, works with CMGE to develop and distribute the Chinese version. Around a quarter of all Angry Birds downloads are conducted in China. CMGE also distributes Chinese versions of other favourite games such as Fruit Ninja, as well as develop its own localised version of the game which features achefslashing fowls and turtles for the pot.
But the most popular games in China remain those with a historic, or martial arts, theme. There are plenty of games with the words “Three Kingdoms” in their titles, for example, in reference to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, considered the first full-length novel in Chinese that was written in the 14th century.
“It’s difficult for players to differentiate games from their titles alone. One way we distribute our games is buy working with mobile phone chipset makers who build our games into phones made by Chinese manufacturers,” Zhang says.
By his estimation, there are around 1m companies in China which develop games, mostly for so-called feature phones (non-smart phones).
His company, which this week is listing on Nasdaq by introduction, is the biggest with a 19 per cent market share of revenue-generating mobile games in China and has been profitable for three years, with net income of $26m last year.
But he says market volatility as well as scepticism towards the corporate governance of mainland Chinese companies in the US means that the company cannot raise any capital from the listing.
