6Waves Lolapps Bringing Social Games to China "In 2 to 3 Months" [INTERVIEW]

During the course of the Disrupt Beijing event that finished yesterday, I caught up with Arthur Chow (pictured right) from 6waves Lolapps, the Hong Kong and San Francisco-based gaming company, to chat about its plans for getting onto social gaming platforms in mainland China.

This new leg of the company’s journey kicked off only last weekend, with the announcement of its acquisition of Chinese game studio Smartron5. Arthur explains that he picked up this young company because it comprises an “experienced team doing AAA titles.” It also snags them Gage Galinger, who’s behind such gaming ventures as Blizzard and Starcraft, and he will now become 6waves Lolapps’ VP of content development and will lead operations in China. It brings the whole company up to about 170 employees, including the new Beijing operations.

Explaining the assets they’ve now acquired, Arthur points out:

Gage knows consumers’ preferences and how social games work … [Smartron5] will help us make games that can be exported, like to Japan or Korea, on Mixi or CyWorld.

It’ll also bring the company faster into mobile gaming, and they’re now hiring engineers and designers for that. The team has not yet decided whether to opt for premium or freemium for its China-oriented mobile games once they arrive on the scene.

6waves Lolapps' social game Ravenskye City, which is huge on Facebook right now.

Coming to China

6waves Lolapps is now planning out a serious and broad push into China as soon as possible, and is, Arthur says, looking at all serious options, such as Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo’s new gaming platform, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ Games, Kaixin, etc. “Tencent is the platform you can’t ignore. So that makes perfect sense for us.” He adds:

For a game to be successful in China, it needs community management – like, maintaining relationships with users, and getting user feedback that you can channel back [to developers].

There’ll be “a game for China in two to three months” and they’ll pick a popular title for its first release that it can learn from , such as a resource-management game. Ravenskye City (pictured above) is actually the company’s biggest game, with about three million gamers on Facebook, so that’s one feasible option for its first social title in China.