Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

November 2, 2013 Leave a comment

Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

By Kaylene Hong, Yesterday

Messaging and gaming seem like two entirely different platforms. You would never have thought it possible — but a messaging service is disrupting the mobile gaming scene in China. In a report released by Chinese Android app store Wandoujia – which monitors trends in China’s mobile market based on its downloads — two out of the top three games on its app store this month are integrated with popular Chinese messaging service WeChat. It appears that playing games in a social setting helps spread the games faster and keeps people hooked to the games — a major advantage over standalone games.One of these games, a Guitar Hero-like scrolling music game called Rhythm Master that requires a WeChat login, has 919,000 monthly downloads.

Another one, a cutesy racing game called WeRunner, which is developed by Tencent-owned WeChat and present within the chat platform’s game center, has chalked up 522,000 monthly downloads — and what’s impressive is WeRunner’s daily revenue once peaked at more than $1 million.

Games on the WeChat platform itself are relatively new. In August this year, Tencent finally included a game center in an update to WeChat, as it released its first iOS game called Tian Tian Ai Xiao Chu.

Despite WeChat stirring up waves across the mobile gaming scene in China, it seems like as long as a game maintains its unique proposition, it will still capture the attention of Chinese players. In this vein, a foreign (standalone) game still takes top spot in October with 2 million monthly downloads — and that’s Plants vs. Zombies 2. The game has been highly popular, raking up 16 million downloads on iOS devices in its opening week.

Wandoujia has more than 170 million Android users in China currently — and its report this month sheds much light on how mobile game developers in the country have to wise up to the influence that WeChat has on gamers as well.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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