August 2, 2011
Today we pay highly attention to Mirae Asset’s raising their forecasts for China’s gaming industry growth this year. They have expected a growth of 28% for the online games industry, instead of the previous 23%; the total revenue of China’s online games industry would be 45 billion Yuan in 2011. They also said the web games industry would reach 6 billion Yuan and the social games industry 1 billion Yuan, increasing by four times compared with 2010.
GameLook believes the follow trends will influence on the future of the social games industry:
1. The openness of social network advertising and platforms.
Social games and web games are based on the browser, while the main difference between the two lies mainly in platforms and ways of promoting. Web games rely on “spam flows” to attract more users and social games depend on viral marketing on social network. If the cost is very close, more web games will launch on the social network in the future, and Tencent, Renren will be the preferred platforms. Tencent’s openness and monetization of SNS advertising will be very important for games companies.
2. The similarity of social games and web games.
Many social games companies’ products of 2011 have the quality of traditional web games, like player killing features and high ARPU, which is very similar to Kabam’s games on Facebook. The second generation of social games will be very similar to web games while also has the traditional viral characters.
3. Mobile devices’ promotion to the development of social games.
Mobile SNS platforms like DeNA、GREE、MIXI and Ameba are very successful in Japan; SNS games bring large revenue to Facebook and it is developing an iOS mobile platform “Sparta”. All these trends have influenced the domestic games industry: Tencent’s mobile platform is also under rapid growth. Mobile devices are natural SNS tools and they can best adapt to social games.
4. Tencent announced cooperation with Zynga during the Chinajoy and Cityville has come to Tencent’s Pengyou platform and later on QZone. More overseas social games companies will enter China’s market with more innovative games.
The social games industry will increase by four times in 2011 is very likely to happen, considering DeNA had reached the goal in one year and it only has 27 million users, Tencent, however, has 100 million active users.