China's biggest e-commerce company may be getting into games

If you don’t live in China, you might be forgiven for not having heard of Alibaba, since it doesn’t operate much outside that nation’s borders. But it’s probably the world’s biggest e-commerce company. On November 11 (China’s equivalent of Black Friday), the company did nearly $6 billion in sales in just 24 hours. And now, it looks like Alibaba might be getting into gaming.

China’s rumor mill is speculating that Alibaba, which has been moving in the direction of mobile for some time now, is looking to get into mobile games and has chosen Giant Interactive as a partner. Whether or not that’s true is tough to pin down, coming as it does from anonymous “industry sources”, but what is known is that Alibaba is recruiting game programmers, as evidenced by the job ad pictured below:

Alibaba has zero experience making games, but this news does make me wonder if the company might be able to introduce a new monetization scheme to the Chinese gaming market. At present, Chinese games can basically only make money as freeium games designed to promote the sale of in-app digital content. But Alibaba has a massive catalogue of actual things to sale. Could it be planning to introduce games that are monetized through the sale of real-life items (for example, licensed clothing or mobile phone cases) from within the game?

It’s certainly possible. At present, it’s pure speculation on my part, but it would be fascinating if China’s biggest e-commerce company was able to make that kind of significant impact on the mobile games market.

(via QQ Games)