Opera's Chinese mobile browser has over 100 million downloads, game platform coming soon

We just learned that Opera’s Chinese mobile browser, Oupeng, has over 100 million downloads in China. It is still far short of UC Browser’s numbers, but 100 million downloads ain’t a small number either. Worldwide, Opera has over 300 million downloads.

While taking pictures of booths and cosplayers at the recent ChinaJoy gaming exhibition in Shanghai, I bumped into Oupeng’s CTO, Fredrik Luo. Curious why he, a browser guy, was attending ChinaJoy, I sat down with him to have a chat.

Indeed, as some might have guessed, the folks from Oupeng were out at ChinaJoy scouting for game developers to work with. Fredrik explained that Oupeng hopes to launch its browser-based game platform by the end of this year. He said that a lot of games need a promotional channel and Oupeng could help solve this problem. There isn’t any fixed plan on how the Oupeng’s game center will look like or function. Currently, half of all downloads via Oupeng are games, so the demand is already there.

Just last month, Oupeng launched Sphinx, a game engine that helps Chinese developers build HTML5 with less difficulty. Fredrik claims that games developed using Sphinx operate three times faster than on Chrome and five times faster than on other browsers. Sphinx also helps developers turn their web-based games into mobile games, both web and hybrid native applications. Clearly, Oupeng has big hopes for the future of HTML5-based games. You can see some of the demos games here built using Sphinx.

Oupeng’s game platform will only be launched in China with the possibility of extending to Opera’s international users if it proves to be a success.

(Editing by Steven Millward)