Coming to a small screen near you

LI FENG/CHINA DAILY

Mobile games are gaining popularity in China, but developers face a multitude of challenges

For Yang Zhen, 33, there are only two types of people in the world - those who love computer games and those who don't. Since his early days at college Yang has been a computer game fanatic. He started with the shoot 'em up Red Alert before moving on to the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, where he spent thousands of yuan on equipment and online tools, as well as a large part of every weekend working in collaboration with cyber friends to achieve the ultimate victory.

But in 2013, the appeal of World of Warcraft gradually began to wane. Instead of sitting at his computer terminal after a busy day at work, the engineer at a power company in East China's Zhejiang province preferred to lie on his couch reading online fantasy novels or playing online game adaptations on his smartphone while keeping an eye on his 6-year-old daughter.

Now, Yang plays a mobile game adapted from a novel called Amazing World. He often pays 50 yuan ($8) to buy tools to improve his online combat ability, a practice known in the industry as "pay to win". Yang, who describes himself as "a reasonable player", has paid about 500 yuan in total, but real aficionados who want to reach the top level, known as VIP10, have to cough up 30,000 yuan.

"Many people are happy to pay that much for this particular game," Yang said, "but in truth, many online mobile games adapted from novels are poor quality. Domestic developers change the plots so the games are easier to play, but that makes them less interesting. The games are poor in terms of interoperability, but because they are adapted from popular online novels many fans of the books are willing to pay to play them."

Yang is one of hundreds of millions of mobile-game players in China. According to a report published by the consultancy iiMedia Research, 385 million people regularly played mobile games in 2013, a rise of 34.6 percent from the previous year, creating a market valued at 12.25 billion yuan. However, only less than 3 percent of the players paid for their entertainment. IiMedia estimates that this year, the number of players will exceed 450 million.

Growing market

Games are seen as one of the most promising sectors of China's mobile Internet industry. At the recent Global Mobile Internet Conference Beijing 2014, Xiao Jian, chief executive officer of the Nasdaq-listed China Mobile Games and Entertainment Group, said that with an annual growth rate of 200 percent, China will overtake Japan as the world's largest mobile-game market in the next two years. Industry insiders estimate that the value of the market will reach between 25 billion and 26 billion yuan by the end of this year.

Given the prospects, it's hardly surprising that the sector is attracting an increasing number of manufacturers, operators and other market players from home and abroad. The Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd started its mobile-game business in the second quarter of 2013 and quickly accrued a market share of 22 percent. At least 400 mobile-game content providers are registered in the southwestern city of Chengdu alone, said Zhang Xiangdong, CEO of Shanda Games, at the conference.

However, while welcoming the growth of the sector, Zhang expressed concerns that the "gold rush" - a large number of market players of various sizes, hot money rushing in, and a low product success rate - will result in a mad dash for profits that will see a flood of low-quality products and, more worrisome, copyright infringement and improper competition, all factors that may harm the development of the industry.

China is home to between 2,000 and 5,000 mobile-game content providers. They produce thousands of games every year, but only about 200 will be successful, said Hu Bin, joint-CEO of the game developer and marketer Ourpalm Co. "As a result, after six months to a year, many startups face huge pressures," he said.

To survive, some content providers either copy other companies' ideas or develop products based on popular stories, cartoons or movies. Crucially though, they don't pay royalties.

Well-known novels, cartoons and animated films find an audience among game players, who are attracted by the familiarity. The market is huge - in January, an authorized game adaptation of Disney's Frozen was downloaded more than 6 million times in the four weeks after it was released, according to Legal Person magazine.