Chinese Gaming Giant The9 Making Mobile Moves, Thinking More Global

Chris Shen, head of mobile at The9

Having already established itself as a powerhouse in the PC online gaming space, Chinese gaming company The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) is now looking to change with the times and already has a decent foothold in the newer game spaces of mobile, social, and web. Its social gaming platform, The9 Game Zone, has accrued more than 12 million users since its launch in April 2011 (see chart below).

We recently spoke with The9’s head of mobile, Chris Shen, to find out more about what they can offer developers, as well as the company’s plans for the future.

Having already invested in mobile-focused companies outside of China like Open Feint and CrowdStar, The9’s Game Zone is hardly the company’s first effort to expand outside China via the mobile space. But the services that it offers to foreign developers aspiring to crack the fragmented Chinese mobile market, given its experience in PC gaming and its vast network of partners, is certainly remarkable. Chris explains:

In the US you just submit your game to the (Apple) App Store or to Google Play, but in China there more than 200 channels. Some would say there are more than 500. It’s quite fragmented and no channel is dominating the market yet. So Th9 has partnered with the most important ones, currently about 80. We are working with all three telecom carriers and their app stores. And we also work with some mobile device manufacturers such as Sony Mobile, HTC, Huawei, etc. We work with some third-party application store such as Gfan, and even Tencent.

He notes that when developers license their game to The9, it’s a big advantage to be able to leverage this large network. This is especially true for small and medium sized developers who might not have the resources to devote to marketing and promotion, especially in Chinese!

The9 Game Zone

But why choose The9 over other partners in China? Chris points to The9’s wider network as its competitive advantage in comparison, noting that their tight collaboration with distribution channels, telecom carriers, and marketing resources ensure that a game will be well promoted.
If a developer licenses a game to just Tencent, for example, they are limited to the Tencent platform.

One of the more prominent mobile games under The9’s umbrella is the 3D MMORPG Galaxy Frontier which was developed by Eitarosoft from Japan. The company feels that online RPGs is a genre that is not really popular yet but could be easily monetized in China. But The9 has its own in-house mobile games studio as well, which was established last year, with the TweetHero battle game ported from its Weibo Three Kingdoms title. They have also launched Fly King in January, a social game with LBS features aimed at the China market

If you build it, will they pay?

Now I conducted this interview with Chris over Skype from Tokyo, and it’s difficult for me to not draw comparisons to the mobile games market here in Japan where companies like GREE and DeNA have already made boatloads of cash. Of course, Japanese mobile users are far more accustomed to paying for things via their mobile, whereas recent research has found that Chinese consumers are quite the opposite. I was eager to hear Chris’s expectations for Chinese mobile consumers and whether they will come around to paying anytime soon. While he acknowledged that the Chinese market is still in the initial stages with parts of the ecosystem on the unhealthy side, it turns out that he is ultimately optimistic: