Chinese Web Game Developer Linekong Online Shifts Focus to Mobile Gaming

Signs announcing the shift to mobile gaming in the Linekong offices.

Earlier this week, Linekong Online was one of China’s best known and biggest developers of web games. But today, the company is no longer a web game developer at all. On Tuesday afternoon, the company unveiled a new strategic focus that will see Linekong shifting completely into mobile games. “Please call us a mobile games company!” blares a banner that was hung in the Linekong offices Tuesday afternoon as the company celebrated the shift.

CEO Wang Feng sees it as a daring, risky move. “This is the most bold and crazy risk our company has taken in our six years in business,” he wrote on his weibo account. The company is not entirely abandoning its old model — it will continue to operate and update already-released games like Warrior King and Journey to the West Online. But all new titles will be mobile games. Wang says the company aims to release six new games in 2013.

Personally I’m not sure the move is as bold and crazy as Wang’s suggesting; China’s mobile game market is big (though not as big as you might think) and growing, so any serious game developer should be looking at it carefully. Moreover, Linekong has released mobile games before, so it won’t exactly be starting from square one in the mobile arena. Still, a wholesale switch this abrupt is pretty rare, and it will be interesting to see whether Linekong can bring its PC gamers over to the mobile platform or whether it will have to attract a whole new audience for its mobile games.

(via TechWeb)