Flurry Partners with Renren Games to Bring App Analytics to Chinese Mobile Game Devs

American mobile analytics firm Flurry knows a thing or two about China — in fact, we just shared some of the company’s latest China mobile stats yesterday — but it has since announced that it’s taking things a step further, forming a partnership with Renren subsidiary Renren Games.This new collaboration will see Flurry offering its analytics and monetization platform to Chinese mobile game developers on Renren Games’s publishing platform. Its services will be localized into Chinese by the Renren Games team, and basic services will be available to devs at the end of this year, with additional enhancements coming in 2014.

This partnership is the latest sign that Renren Games is taking big data very seriously. Earlier this month, we saw the company invest 10 million RMB in a data analytics and behavioral analysis center at China’s prestigious Qinghua University. Flurry’s analytics and monetization can help push Renren’s third-party developers to perform better, which of course is also good news for Renren. In a couple of years, once the company and its developers have amassed enough data and had enough time to figure out how their approach to developing games should change in accordance with that data, I expect to see some seriously addicting games popping up on this platform.

For Flurry’s part, the partnership gives the American firm a foot in the door of China’s booming mobile app industry. That’s a good thing, but the company is likely to face a challenge from entrenched domestic mobile analytics firms like Umeng and App Annie. As mobile continues to explode in China, though, big data analytics is certain to play a key role, and with so much growth still ahead for the market, there may be room at the table for Flurry and its domestic competitors when all’s said and done.