I am a big believer in the mobile internet in China. I think that eventually the number of mobile internet users might surpass the users who go online on a computer, currently it’s 80 million mobile internet users out of 260 million who go online in total. I especially think that mobile games could be a huge market in China, because entertainment (and not information) is still the main thing that people are looking for online. Therefore we now launched our first mobile game portal in China at shouji.game.com.cn (shouji = mobile phone in Chinese).
A dedicated team worked hard on the site over the past months and I am very pleased with the result. The site is different from many other mobile gaming sites because it completely avoids China Mobile’s quasi-monopoly and its service providers. Instead of using SMS links to download the game to a phone, we use the old-fashioned way of downloading the file to a computer and then transferring it from the computer to the phone.
In the original version of the site we still used the SMS method and charged a few RMB per game, but after trying it myself I got bombarded with spam messages, which is not the best way to keep customers happy. Because we also had to give almost all the money we earned to the SP’s and China Mobile anyway, we decided to forget about this and go for a free model without the intervention of any other parties.
The site itself is quite easy to use, you can either search for a game and then check if it is available for your phone, or select your mobile phone model and then see what games are available for that type. We offer both single player and multiple player games to our users. Soon we will also start offering games with in-game items (especially for multiplayer games). As on all our Chinese sites you can rate the games and you can leave comments about the games.
Of course the website is completely in Chinese and all games are localized Chinese language mobile games, so if you cannot read Chinese you’ll have a hard time downloading and playing the games.
I really like the looks of this new site and it’s so easy to navigate 🙂
Hallo Marc,
Goed om te zien dat Spill eindelijk weer eens gaat experimenteren met mobile games. Leuk ook om te zien dat heel veel games die ik vroeger voor Overloaded probeerde naar Nederland te halen, bij jou op de portal staan. Ik heb een klein verhaal geschreven op http://mobilegames.blogs.com/mobile_games_blog/2008/10/spill-group-lau.html. Publiek is voornamelijk operators, developers en publishers.
Leuk dat je er wat over geschreven hebt, ik zag je post inderdaad al in mijn Google Alerts voor mobile games voorbijkomen.
Interesting article Marc, mobile apps will become a very important market.
“we use the old-fashioned way of downloading the file to a computer and then transferring it from the computer to the phone”
The users needs to have a cable to connect their mobile with a computer (or a bluetooth enabled pc/cellphone), do all Chinese mobiles come with this cable?
As far as I’m aware, there are much more mobile phones than pc’s in China, where would the file transfer take place for those without a pc, at an internet cafe?
How do you reach mobile users without a pc? Do Chinese mobile phones have a browser which directs to a provider homepage or so?
Thanks for sharing,
Bart
chinese players are not willing to pay for the mobile games itself, but would like to pay a lot for the in-game items. u may have great chance in that market. gd luck:)
Almost all mobile phones come with pc connection cables, I think that’s not only in China the case. It’s more whether people are willing to invest the time and effort to do this. They can do it either at home, in the office or in an internet cafe.
For now we do not reach mobile users without a PC yet. But of course that is the next step 🙂
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