Qihoo’s 360 Game Center, 37wan.com and YY Game, three leading domestic gaming platforms, will establish an alliance for exclusive licensed web games this November (report in Chinese).
Under the agreement, the three members of the alliance will share operation resources and launch in-depth corporations. Games that granted exclusive operation licenses to any member of the alliance can distribute the games on all of the three platforms and enjoy joint operation resources.
The first game to be operated by the alliance is Shenchuangtianxia developed by 7th Road Technology. The alliance will introduce more web games under this cooperation model in the future, said a representative of the alliance.
The resources of web game industry tend to flow to a few giants. The market size of Chinese web games reached 3.29 billion yuan ($538.01 million) in the first quarter of this year, but the market share of top 5 enterprises reached 54.6%, according to data released by Analysys.
360 Game Center, 37wan and YY Game account for 8.7%, 8.2% and 4.1% of the market share respectively, taking the 4th, 5th and 7th spot on the market share list, while Tencent takes crown on the list with an 18% market share (source in Chinese).
This alliance may challenge the dominance of Tencent Games in the web game sector by providing better operation platforms.