Chinse Android app distributor Wandoujia released the latest issue for this February, shedding light on the holiday success stories and game branding triumphs during the period.
1. Mobile Catches a Ride on the Year of the Horse
The Chinese New Year usually heralds a lull in app downloads as more people spend time with friends and family, but some apps defied traditional drops in downloads and scored big on the occasion.
WeChat “Red Envelope”
WeChat debuted a viral “Red Envelope” function in its messenger, allowing users to send the traditional New Year’s gift of cash electronically. Users can have fun in gaining random amounts from a single envelope via the “lottery” features. 4.82 million WeChat users took part in the lucky money game on 2014 Chinese New Year eve, as disclosed by WeChat’s parent company Tencent. Tencent lured 8 million bank cards to their payments system over the holiday, because users had to link their bank cards to Tencent’s payment service for distributing or receiving the cash gifts.
Sending well-wishes and clever poems to family and friends for the coming year is a New Year’s Eve tradition. Beautiful Wishes and Hourse-Year Blessings are two apps that climbed to the Top Ten Apps by enabling users to share beautiful holiday cards via social networks. The two apps recorded 32,393 and 10,060 downloads respectively.
In addition to New Year themed apps, the holiday also triggered a surge in app downloads in general before the 7-day holiday started on Jan. 31, as more and more people who work in big cities tend to download apps to kill times on their way back to hometowns, according to a report by Papaya Mobile.
2. Episode II: Games That Strike Back
New game sequels got massive downloads and filled the charts this month. Six of the top fifteen new games demonstrate the brand loyalty of Chinese gamers with massive monthly downloads. Chinese consumers are notorious for their risk adverse behavior, and it seems this rewards risk adverse developers willing to leverage brand power: If it aren’t broke, make a sequel.
image credit: Wandoujia
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