The picking up trend of mobile gaming relieved mobile startups of the risk of going out of business due to the monetization conundrum on mobile ends. We’ve seen a bunch of Chinese mobile gaming companies gained popularities among mobile addicts, some even claimed astounding monthly revenue, for instance, The Fishing Joy franchisees brought in north of RMB 10 million to its developer PunchBox.
A Robust Start
Being the largest mobile browser vendor on the planet by installation, UCWeb apparently also spotted the gold mine of mobile gaming and leveraged on its huge user pool of more than 400mn to the advantage of its new gaming business 9game.cn made available in 2010.
9game to date boasts 60+ million MAU (monthly active users), operates over 400 games on its premise while 20 out of which generated more than RMB 1 million after-cut revenue every month. Overall, UCWeb’s 9game brought in more than RMB 100 million to its gaming business partners last year and the number is expected to be hitting 300 million by the end of this year.
UCWeb alongside with 9game has become the second largest mobile game platform as well as the largest Android game platform.
New Strategies in 2013
As of now, UCWeb has more than 100 million users on Android platform, what’s more promising is, 70% out of the new Android users chooses UCWeb as their choice of mobile surfer. 9Game is well positioned to capitalized on that new gained users.
Zhu Shunyan, COO of the company said that “mobile game has become a trend chased by players in mobile industry”, he believed that the mounting competition would eventually lead to a reshuffle of the industry.
How will UCWeb/9Game survive the head-to-head competition in a crowded market? The Beijing-based company put up their new strategies for 2013, including: fostering developments of HTML5-based games, curating star-quality games, bolstering small developers via investments, loans and so forth and overseas expansion. In addition to these, 9game also partnered with some preeminent game studios – for instance, GameLoft – to introduce their portfolios to its platform,
“2013 would be a year of both challenges and opportunities for mobile game companies”, said Mr. Zhu, “we’re hoping that we can help our partners to stand out in the competition.”
homepage of UCWeb 9game.cn
Image credit: 9game.cn
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