Wrap Up on Mobile and Online Gaming Convergence event

Wrap Up on Mobile and Online Gaming Convergence event

After 3 months away, mobilemonday shanghai was back to discuss convergence between mobile and online gaming. We had the pleasure to host 4 distinguished guests from Troodo, China Mobile, Gobi Ventures, Interfax.

Troodon and Interfax presentations can be downloaded here and here .

Here is a round up on the event itself:
(big thanks to Bill Crampton from BTT China for having greatly contributed to this column)

According to Interfax (Iris Hong, China TMT team leader), the mobile market is encountering steady growth (see below for downloadable report) and China Mobile launched a new mobile gaming platform for connected mobile games, charging either on a monthly basis or per item (per level reached in the game) with free download. 9 games have been launched on this platform already.

Current challenges and conclusion from the panel :
– Operators dominates value chain and control the pipe, China Mobile is now owning 2 gaming platforms
– Technical difficulties – launching 3G is everything but easy, especially on unproven technology such as TD-SCDMA.
– Restructuring in industry creates uncertainty (and opportunities, but that remains to be seen actually).
– Current network speed is low, difficult to download over 1 mb in size
-High data fees in Beijing and Shanghai, much cheaper in Guangdong
-Faster data speed SHOULD mean fees go down, even in shanghai and Beijing, which are currently the most expensive in China.

Here is more on individual presentations.

Troodon – Larry Zhang, CEO and Founder

PC Online Gaming (POG) is tje most successful online business model in China
Do players only play Mobile Online Games (MOG) for short periods? actually, no! Average user spends 4.5 hours per day on the game – not snack, but dinner
60 percent are students, also soldiers who are not allowed to use the Internet
Troodon Heroes of Song doing well now
MOG user base is much bigger than POG base
Customers pay no less for MOG than for POG
Traffic fee #1 limitation, many users max out by 20th of the month or so, after they have used up their 100 MB data package.

China Mobile – Mr. Wang WeiXun, Sr Project Manager

China Mobile gaming platform needs work
Long term goal is to support large scale MOG services
China Mobile only invests in platform when business model is well established. Example; Fetion (Feixin) platform developed after QQ established market