There was lots of interesting tech news going down in Asia this week, and particularly in China. The iPhone hit in a few new countries, although there was more going down around the region that warranted attention.

Coincidentally, much of the news from this week did center around apps that run on iPhones though. I guess there just isn’t any escape, is there?

Charlie’s pick: You’ll Never Guess What The9 and ZTE Are Teaming Up to Work On

The MIIT news is huge, too — Steven will explain that shortly — but I’m going to pick this news this week because I think it’s indicative of where a lot of Chinese tech companies are headed right now. I won’t give away what it is they’re working on, but it’s something a lot of other tech and web companies are thinking about working on, too.

Rick’s pick: GREE’s ‘Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops’ Hit 100,000 Downloads in First 2 Days

This new title from GREE and Konami got off to a good start with 100,000 downloads in its first two days. And today we’re hearing that it the mobile game has gone on surpassed 500,000 downloads. And to mark the occasion, players will be able to earn 1.5x experience points from now until December 17 as part of its campaign to mark the milestone.

Steven’s pick: China’s App-ocalypse? All App Stores Might Have to be Regulated

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) seems keen to regulate all of the nation’s app stores, leaving developers worried about the potential impact. This would apply even to Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google Play. While it might help control piracy and malware on the numerous third-party app stores in China, this kind of monitoring by authorities will, I reckon, likely involve some meddling into the kinds of apps that can be distributed.

Willis’ pick: Line App Launches in China

The chat app war is getting really intense! Tencent might have thought that WeChat was safe and secure in China with it huge user base. But Line isn’t giving up without a fight, hoping to loosen WeChat’s stranglehold in China. It’s unlikely Line will win the battle, but it’s ballsy for NHN Japan to take such big risk. Grab your popcorn, place your bets. We may be in for an epic battle in China between Line and WeChat.

The9 is one of China’s biggest gaming companies. ZTE is one of its biggest handset and telecom equipment makers. So what do you get when you put those two things together? No, seriously, take a second and think of a guess! Got one? OK, here’s what they’re working on: an internet television company. Wait, what?

It’s certainly not what I was expecting, but it’s true: ZTE and The9 have announced the establishment of a new joint subsidiary company (to be not-so-creatively called ZTE The9) based in Wuxi that will work on value-added services for the internet television industry. The ultimate goal is to create products that will support the web, mobile phones, and televisions, to get into 90 percent of Chinese households with internet TVs, and to create a high-quality internet TV entertainment platform. The new company’s CEO Zhao Jingyi said that the goal is to do all of that within two or three years, which certainly sounds ambitious.

The9 does have content partnerships with a number of mobile and TV companies to bring gaming videos to their platforms, so the partnership isn’t quite as weird as it sounds at first, although I have no idea what ZTE is bringing to the table. But it may just be that the companies see an opening for smart TVs in China. If that’s the case, they certainly wouldn’t be alone; there has been a lot of talk about the future development of China’s internet and smart TV sector recently (fueled in part by all the Xiaomi TV news).

Personally, I do think there could be an opening for smart TVs and an internet TV platform to explode in China. Although the concept hasn’t really caught on in the West, where people who want to access the internet services via TVs often do so via gaming consoles or HTPC setups, both of those things are far less common in China, and set-top boxes seem like a very short-term solution that is destined to ultimately be replaced by services and platforms that come pre-installed on the televisions themselves. My guess is that ZTE The9′s two to three year timeframe is a bit overly ambitious, but I could certainly be wrong. The tech industry in China is developing very quickly, and in another couple of years, things might really look totally different. My guess is that ZTE The9 will also be up against a lot of competition, though. It’s clear that Xiaomi is interested in the internet TV sector, and I expect a lot of other internet and tech companies to head in similar directions over the next year or two, especially if Xiaomi is able to resolve its regulatory issues.

[via Sina Tech]

I’ve been excited about Firefall for a while now. The game, developed by The9-owned Red Five studios, is a free-to-play shooter the company has big plans for globally, including throughout East and Southeast Asia. Firefall could be The9′s first big international multiplayer hit, and the stakes are pretty high given the company’s dire financial situation.

But is the game itself any good? This past weekend I got the opportunity to participate in a closed beta for the game, which hasn’t officially been released yet. For new players, the game starts with choosing a class and designing a character. I chose the generic assault class and made a few tweaks to my character’s appearance, although there weren’t an awful lot of options. After an oddly long loading time — I’ll write that off as a quirk of the beta — I found myself in what appeared to be some kind of transport spaceship, drifting over an alien planet. Before long, the ship had touched down, and the real game had begun.

Firefall is a massively-multiplayer first-person-shooter (FPS), although it can also be played from a third-person perspective. Players move about an open world competing quests, and although I saw lots of other players in my time with Firefall, I didn’t really interact with any of them. Sometimes we were shooting the same enemies at the same time, but it often felt almost like a single-player game, though I didn’t progress very far and things may change later on.

The best thing that I can say about Firefall is that it feels great. The controls are natural, and the addition of rocket boots that give players — well, at least the assault class — a temporary upward boost really helps make the game feel unique. There are also temporary glider wings that can be picked up and used at specific spots, and gliding around through the game world is smooth and fun. In fact, I enjoyed the gliding enough that I wish it had been made into more of a core mechanic of the game. Think about how the “skis” in Tribes give that game its own totally unique feel; I think there might have been an opportunity to do something similar with the gliders here. As it is, they’re fun, but they’re only available when you happen to run into them.

Visually, the world of Firefall didn’t impress me. That’s not to say that it looks bad; it’s no Crysis but for a free-to-play game the visuals are top notch. The art design is less impressive, and the sci-fi jungle environments I explored didn’t feel particularly special or unique. (That said, I was only able to check out a small area of the map during my time with the game, and it’s possible there are more interesting areas out there). The world also feels pretty chaotic, and with tons of NPCs and other players running around. Everything felt very dense, and not in a good way.

But Firefall’s real failure was in its missions. After an early one required me to blast some enemies, I was given a new mission that entailed mining something or other out of the ground using grenades. I understand that grinding is a part of MMO games, but this is also an FPS, and throwing grenades at the ground isn’t all that fun or compelling. In fact, it’s pretty boring. My boredom was compounded by the fact that the directions for this mission were terrible. I was directed to use “the call-down menu on my nav wheel” to select the grenades, but I never found any such menu and my mouse’s nav wheel did switch between weapons but didn’t seem to allow me to select anything. Ultimately, I figured out how to throw the grenades by accident, but I wasted my first few throws tossing grenades at an objective marker before realizing that the marker wasn’t actually marking the location I needed to mine, it was just placed in the general vicinity of my objectives.

Having finally figured out what I needed to do and how to do it, I mined the ores I needed and took them back to someone, who promptly directed me to use a nearby console to build…something. I didn’t quite catch what he (or maybe she, the characters are very forgettable) said, and when I opened up the console menu I was presented with a staggering array of dozens of options of things to build, and no indication of which one I needed. I messed around with it for a minute or two, but I still couldn’t figure out how to make what I wanted, and I realized I didn’t care. I didn’t feel any connection to any of the NPCs I was talking to, I wasn’t doing any shooting in what was ostensibly supposed to be an FPS game, and I decided I didn’t need to bother with the missions anymore.

Wandering around the game world at random was more enjoyable, and I was able to jump into a few firefights, and even got myself killed once or twice. I also rescued another player who had been knocked down. It wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had in an FPS, but it was way more interesting that throwing grenades at dirt, and I couldn’t help but wonder why the game didn’t have me doing fun missions like that to learn the ropes instead of wandering around searching for ore markers to throw grenades at.

I’m sure there are plenty of far more interesting missions later in the game, but Firefall‘s failure to captivate at the beginning could be a death sentence if it isn’t rectified before the final launch. The game is free, so many players aren’t going to feel obligated to push on and “beat” it the way they might a title they have already spent money on. Instead, they’re just going to do what I did: shut it down, and fire up some other more interesting game (my post-Firefall game of choice was X-COM: Enemy Unknown, which is incredible).

Firefall is also going to face some tough competition in the free-to-play FPS market when it is released. It already has to compete with the excellent Tribes: Ascend, and the free-to-play mech FPS Hawken opens this Wednesday. Firefall is likely to be better marketed and better localized in Asia than either of those games given that The9 is a Chinese company with offices across Asia, but even the best marketing can only get users in the door, and it’s never going to be enough to keep people playing a boring game.

The tragedy here is that I don’t think Firefall necessarily is a boring game. But for me, it made a pretty boring first impression, and for a free-to-play shooter with plenty of excellent competition, that may be all it takes.

Tencent's iconic penguin mascot surfs its way to social gaming success.

A seasonal survey of China’s online gaming market by Analysys International reveals some stellar growth up to the end of 2012 Q1 – and that Tencent (HKG:0700) has extended its lead as the country’s mavens of social gaming. Back in 2011 Q2, the Shenzhen-based web giant dominated with 29.5 percent of market share by revenue, but that’s now up to 33.7 percent.

The whole gaming sector has grown to be worth US$1.78 billion in terms of revenue in China. That’s 9.5 percent growth from the previous quarter.

There was a bit of a shuffle below Tencent, as Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) moved up from third to second spot, now claiming 17.3 percent of domestic online gaming revenue. Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) saw no growth – despite its new World Zero title – and consequently got demoted to third.

Tencent runs China’s biggest social network with its QQ empire of IM, social networks, and social gaming. Earlier this week, we looked at the QQ Games exclusive tie-up with PopCap to launch Plants vs Zombies Great Wall Edition. It also operates some more hardcore MMO titles such as Crossfire. Indeed, social gaming is a large part of the reason behind the company having far-and-away China’s richest web portal.

Here’s the interactive chart for market share by revenue among China’s gaming services (2012 Q1):

(View the pie chart as a static image).

The online gaming market as a whole saw 33 percent year-on-year growth. When we last looked, last summer, it was at 8.7 billion RMB ($1.36 billion at that time), but the new figures show the industry has expanded to the point where it reels in 11.26 billion RMB ($1.78 billion) up to the end of 2012 Q1:

[Sources: Analysys International 1 and 2]

The9 says you're fired.

Chinese game developer/publisher The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) may be in some trouble. Rumors are floating around that the company has made big staff cuts — as much as 50 percent — in its technology and platform operations departments, and CEO Zhu Jun has even supposedly sold his stake in Shanghai Shenhua, Shanghai’s professional soccer team.

The layoff news comes from a former employee in the company’s tech department, who told reporters he was laid off along with 50 percent of his department because The9′s financial reports weren’t looking good. The9 has indeed been operating at a loss since 2009, when it lost the rights to operate World of Warcraft in China. In its most recent filings, for Q4 2011, the company reported a loss of 126 million RMB (about $20 million). The company has not confirmed the layoffs, although a rep did say that the rumors were exaggerated. Officially, the company says this:

In accordance with the needs of our business, The9 has recently begun strategic adjustments. We are optimizing operations programs and the relevant human-relations structures, and this optimization to increase the efficiency of the company is a necessary adjustment.

Yeah, that’s corporate-speak for: “We just fired a bunch of people.”

The potential light at the end of the tunnel for The9 is Firefall, an online shooter being developed by The9-owned Red 5 Studios. I’m not convinced the game will be able to fill the gaping hole in The9′s books, but the company has made some significant deals to distribute the game in other regions already, including a recent $10 million licensing agreement with Russia’s Innova Systems.

The game, which is currently in closed beta, has been impressing people who’ve gotten a chance to play it, and The9 is clearly hoping it makes a big splash. It probably will. But a $20-million-a-quarter-sized splash? That might be a lot to hope for.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech, Image via GameSpy]

The fantasy game, which features buxom ladies like the one pictured at right, is quite popular on the mainland, so $2 million isn’t as crazy-large a figure as it might seem for the right to operate the game in two other big culturally-Chinese gaming markets.

It’s still a big number, though. In fact, it’s the largest sum paid to date for the Taiwan operating rights of a Chinese game. The9 is understandably quite pleased, and presumably so is Taiwan Weibao Digital, who gets to be the exclusive operator of the game for the next three years. Their contract with The9 also apparently includes a minimum earnings clause, although the details of that aren’t clear.

[Sina Tech]

Nicolas Anelka sporting Firefall logo, photo from shenhuafc.com.cn

Back in December we told you about Chinese gaming company, The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY), and its efforts to bring Firefall (from subsidiary Red 5 Studios) to Southeast Asia. At the time Tony Park, head of The9’s Korea branch, noted that there was not any marketing strategy for bigger countries like China or Korea. But yesterday all that changed, as The9 announced that it has entered into an endorsement deal with football star Nicolas Anelka and his new team, Shanghai Shenhua, with whom he signed a few weeks back.

The agreement with Anelka is a one-year, worldwide endorsement deal worth 2.7 million euros ($3.4 million) for the 32-year-old Frenchman. The deal with Shenhua is for two years, costing The9 RMB 32 million (just over $5 million). And now that the entire Shanghai Shenhua team will have Firefall emblazoned across their chests, it means huge visibility in a young demographic for The9. Chris Shen, VP of marketing at The9, commented on this:

A big portion of Firefall gamers are also soccer fans, most of whom are male, passionate about sports, and actively followers of entertainment stories of sport stars. We are going to implement the cross-marketing campaigns throughout the year that leverage the popularity of Anelka and Shenhua to enhance the brand awareness of Firefall among the target audiences in both China and the global market.

Firefall is still in private beta and has yet to officially launch. But we’re hoping that day isn’t too far off.

It’s not the first time that we have seen the gaming industry make its mark on sport here in Asia. A few weeks back we also saw Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA (TYO:2432) buy a majority stake in the Yokohama BayStars (now the Yokohama DeNA BayStars) baseball team.

So, being Blizzard’s WoW operating partner in China has always been a coveted position, and it’s a partnership Blizzard has already shown it is willing to reevaluate. In 2009, for example, they ditched local partners The9 and took up with Netease. Now, rumors are swirling on Weibo that Blizzard is in talks with Tencent, and considering dropping Netease and going with Tencent as the new China WoW operator.

But you might want to take these rumors with a few grains of salt. Blizzard has already responded to the rumors, saying it hopes to continue working with Netease. Netease hasn’t said anything, but industry experts and insiders seem to agree that a Blizzard-Tencent deal is pretty unlikely.

Why? There are a number of reasons, but two of the most compelling are that Tencent is already partnered with Blizzard rival NCsoft and that Tencent already has many games competing with WoW that would profit if Tencent were able to get control of WoW and, er, run it into the ground. Moreover, Tencent has been showing signs it is seriously eyeing the international gaming market, and might be looking to become a Blizzard competitor in its own right.

So is Blizzard thinking of switching to Tencent? Probably not. But hey, you never know. Plus, we need something to talk about while we’re waiting around for that panda expansion pack, right?

(Just kidding, you should all be playing Skyrim instead).

[DoNews via Sina Tech]

Shaking hands on the Reg 5-Garena deal

The9, a Chinese gaming company, recently established a South Korean branch. Not content with expanding just into Korea, The9 also recently inked a deal for The9-owned American developers Red 5 Studios to bring their game Firefall to Southeast Asia via Singapore-based Garena. Tony Park, the head of The9′s Korea branch, recently sat down to talk with Korean gaming site Thisisgame, and shed more light on the deal, the game, and gaming in China and Korea in general.

(A brief disclaimer: the original article is in Korean, which I can’t read, so I’m working from this Chinese translation on QQ Games. Given that I’m translating from a translation anyway, I won’t bother with direct quotes.)

First, Park was asked why bring Firefall to Taiwan and Southeast Asia before approaching bigger markets like China and Korea. He responded that the market strategy for those larger countries wasn’t yet in place, but that they wanted to get things rolling in the right direction as quickly as possible; hence the early expansion into smaller Asian markets.

Those markets aren’t necessarily going to be easy, though. Park conceded that they’d face challenges from Korean first-person shooter games in the Southeast Asian market, but pointed out that Firefall — as an open world, massively-multiplayer PvE-based FPS — is pretty distinct from much of the competition, which tends to be low player-count PvP games in small maps rather than an open world (although Firefall does have PvP elements as well as PvE). He says this is something they discussed with Garena during the negotiations, and ultimately Garena was convinced of the game’s ability to compete or they wouldn’t have signed the deal.

So that explains why Garena went for Firefall, but why did Red 5 and The9 go for Garena? Park says they were impressed by Garena’s performance as the operator of League of Legends in many Asian countries, where it was offering reliable service despite extremely high player counts. Players in Southeast Asia trust them, and their service has worked for similar free-to-play titles like League of Legends, so Garena was a natural choice.

I'm Tony Park, suckaaaaa! (not a direct quote)

Of course, there’s also the question of the deal, which at $10 million just for southeast Asia broke a record that had been previously set by multiplayer gaming giant Blizzard. Park says the number got so high simply because people — Garena reps and gamers in general — were excited about the game. After Red 5 showed it and let people play it publicly at a number of gaming conventions internationally (G-star, Chinajoy, PAX, etc.), Garena was convinced the game was, as they say, the real deal.

Despite the Asian-connections, Firefall is an American game that’s being developed primarily by the Red 5 Studios team in the US. How will that affect its reception in Southeast Asia and elsewhere? Park notes that very few American and European online games find major success in Asia. But, the Firefall team is made up of a lot of people who worked on World of Warcraft, one of the few Western online games that is an undeniable smash hit in Asia. And, of course, Red 5 has studio branches in Asia and is now owned by The9, so they’re being led by people who know Asia well.

On a broader note, Park was asked about the differences between the market in China and Korea, since he’s in a particularly unique position to deal with them both on a regular basis. He said there was lots of imagination in the constantly-changing Chinese market, but that he also felt there wasn’t a lot of creative challenge happening at the development level.

In case you’re wondering what the heck everyone is talking about, here’s the Firefall trailer from G-star. Think this has the potential to conquer Southeast Asia?

[Via QQ Games]

via Red 5 Studios

Red 5 Studios — an American game developer owned by Chinese game publisher The9 — is making a free-to-play first-person-shooter game called Firefall. In South Korea (where The9 just opened a new branch) the company announced that it had signed a deal with Garena, a Singapore-based games publisher, to bring Firefall to southeast Asia.

Moreover, the $10 million deal set a record for a southeast Asian game distribution deal, eclipsing the record set earlier this year by Blizzard in their agreement with distributor Asiasoft to publish World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3. Comparing the deals on a per-game basis, Firefall brought in more than any of Blizzard’s titans, which is pretty impressive given that it hasn’t been released yet. But perhaps there’s something in their blood; many of the folks on the Red 5 team had previously worked for Blizzard on World of Warcraft, and clearly Garena was impressed by what they’ve seen of the game so far.

For the record, so am I. And Korea’s Gstar games conference gave the Red 5 guys an excuse to release another trailer, which I’ve embedded below. The game is a massively-multiplayer online shooter that looks like a fascinating mix of World of Warcraft, Team Fortress, Tribes, Halo, and cool glitchy electronica music (though that may just be in the trailers). The game’s in private beta right now, and we’ve asked to get in so we can check it out. It looks like the sort of thing that could take Asia by storm, and Red 5, The9, and Garena certainly know their markets well, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

[Via QQ Games]

The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) is a China-based gaming giant that provides SDKs for game developers to leverage its plug-and-play social gaming solution, Game Zone. Shen Guo Ding, vice director and manager of The9′s Mobile Internet business, says that there are many problems in the mobile gaming ecosystem in China. One of the largest problems is that gamers in China are so used to downloading free games online. Gaming companies can’t monetize based on pay-per-download, but Shen still sees opportunities.

It’s simple — Free games usually attract more gamers which in turn makes the game more fun; the more the merrier. And with more gamers on board, developers can construct the in-game business model to ensure that the game is fun and yet able to be monetized by selling virtual goods. Shen shared three ways to motivate games to buy virutal items in-game:

• PK and leaderboards: Gamers who PK (i.e., fight against other players) want to win. And to win, most gamers wouldn’t mind spending a dollar or two to buy better equipment. While winning is a major push for folks to buy virtual goods, the gamers’ desire to look good is also another motivation that triggers buying of virtual goods. Winning in style is a good phrase to sum up this point.
• Make gamers “chase/wait for” something: This point is pretty clear if we use Farmville as an illustration. Farmers often have to wait for hours or even days to harvest a money-making crop. The wait is frustrating and gamers often find themselves buying tokens to speed up the harvest. The same principle can also be applied to mobile games.
• Making games social: Shen admitted that this point is basic but still felt the need to emphasize it. He says that the key to making a game social is by making it a default destination whenever a gamer logs on to his PC. The actual gameplay should attract a gamer, as should the friends who he/she has met in the game. Some quick tips Shen gave were to add a chat room within the game and also make sharing available to other social platforms like Weibo.

Previously, we have also covered how The9 has helped Tomb of Qin – a game made by China’s Dragon Team Interactive – to hit 500,000 downloads across all of its outlets in China.

Chinese gaming company The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) has been pushing its services as an international game distributor this year, first launching its Game Zone service, and then launching an SDK for it this summer. And now The9 says that it has brought 500 licensed games from around the world onto over 30 Android app stores in China – from telco and manufacturer stores to numerous start-up markets.

Regular readers will know that not many Chinese Android users actually stick with Google’s (NASQAQ:GOOG) own Android Market, instead preferring to use local alternatives that offer faster speeds without being tied to a Google account. Recently I reviewed eight such alternative Android app stores in China, and found a healthy ecosystem that supported users here pretty well. But for international game developers, it’s a complex issue and a potential barrier to entry into China (to say nothing of the language divide as well).

The9 reveals today that this game, Tomb of Qin, is its most popular one distributed in China, with 500,000 downloads to date.

That was a strong motivation for The9 in launching its Game Zone. To get a clearer idea of how it has developed to this point in time, Penn-Olson chatted with The9′s Chris Shen, who’s the GM of its mobile business unit.

Prior to launch, The9 realised that Chinese users are not huge fans of the official Market, and so the company looked at “lots of other channels.” Shen continues:

Here, manufacturers provide their own channels, and telcos provide them too. And then there’s HiAPK, GoAPK, Gfans, etc. [...] No one channel dominates here yet. That’s why we felt that to get more coverage for those apps we need to partner with more channels.

Mr Shen reveals that its top two distributed apps in China right now have nearly one million downloads between them. The most popular one is Tomb of Qin – made by China’s Dragon Team Interactive – with 500,000 downloads across all of The9′s outlets in China; the second most popular is Speedx 3D – published by London-based Hyperbees – with 450,000 downloads. It’s a happy coincidence that one is local and one is international – showing the power of getting your app out there to more Chinese casual gamers.

Telco App Stores

In China, all three mobile telcos – China Mobile (HKG:0941), China Unicom (HKG:762), and China Telecom (HKG:0728) – have their own markets and have even implemented carrier billing. Also, some manufacturers have done something similar, such as HTC‘s (TPE:2498) own Market, and Motorola‘s (NYSE:MMI) Shop4Apps; both of those are aimed at developing countries which need a customized solution.

And so The9 aimed squarely at these telco app stores, despite – or because of – their weak app offerings. Shen adds:

We have a very in-depth relationship with China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, and we have a ‘store within a store’ – The9 Store – on those, with all our licensed distributed apps.

With China Mobile, The9 even has an SMS-based promo campaign, to ensure that some major titles get a big marketing push. Here’s the Speedx 3D app page on China Mobile’s MMarket:

The9's most popular foreign game it distributes in China. Speedx 3D has so far had 450,000 downloads in the country.

Security: The Thorn in Android’s Side

Just yesterday I wrote about how some of the Chinese app stores were failing to check apps for malware, exacerbating Android security short-falls that make apps easy to tweak and inject with spyware and repackage. In many ways, The9 tries to be a bulwark against this, serving as a reputable distributor for mobile gamers to look out for. Plus, Shen tells Penn-Olson:

We have a delegate team to track our [distributed] apps across channels in China, so it can find fake or pirated versions of our games, and then begin negotiations to have them removed.

So, that’s how the Game Zone is going so far. It’s marketed as a “one-stop solution” that comprises localization, the packaging of binaries, advertising, and the SDK itself. There’s also OpenFeint integration in most of the international games it distributes here, as a sort of part of the service. That stems from The9′s investment in OpenFeint in March of this year.

In more recent news from the company, The9 announced earlier this week that it’ll open a branch office in South Korea.

Also, here’s The9 Game Zone portal for developers.

Tony Park at today's event, via QQ games

The new branch will be headed up by Tony Park, who is currently the company’s vice president. Details are still scarce as the announcement was just made and The9 has not yet even posted a press release, but it appears that The9′s new Korean branch will — unsurprisingly — be looking to release some of the games it operates in China to the Korean market, including DungeonCraft, Poxnora, Free Realms, and Planetside 2.

This is not The9′s first move outside China. Recently, the company set up a new branch of Red 5 Studios — which it acquired in 2010 — in Singapore.

As the gaming industry in China grows, we expect to see more developers, publishers, and operators venturing outside China’s borders, especially into other Asian countries. That said, Korea may prove a challenge for The9, as the games industry there is quite firmly established and the most popular online games are already being distributed and operated by other companies.

Just for fun, check out the trailer for Red 5 Studio’s upcoming free-to-play FPS Firefall, which should be entering open beta this December. Expect to see The9 and Red 5 Singapore as the exclusive operator of the game throughout much if not all of Asia.