The Three Graces

Factors in favour of soft gaming in China and Asia Pacific

There are at least three important virtues of subscription gaming and other soft gaming in the China and the Asia Pacific region. The first is the formats are generally free of hostile regulatory action by governments that ban gambling generally; ban online offshore gambling specifically; or want to tax it heavily.

The second is they offer the chance of secondary revenue streams through the sale of things such as avatars—on-screen icons or animated characters that can be used to represent the player in the game.

The third virtue is that because these games are deemed as ‘safe’ from government restriction, they offer their owners opportunities for strategic alliances with mobile communications networks or online social networking sites. Telecoms networks often have significant debt liabilities arising from the purchase of digital spectrum for 3G services and also face downward pressure on carriage costs because of lobbying by consumers and regulators. Any content that keeps people online for extended periods is going to be welcomed as a way of generating extra revenue.

Partners

PacificNet is working with Chinese telecom operators in the delivery of so-called casual games.

“We are a service provider and content provider for various mobile value added services for China Mobile, the biggest telecoms operator in the world, and the second largest, China Unicom,” says Tony Tong, Chairman of PacNet.

Revenue model

Soft gaming content may also provide telecoms and networking operators new opportunities for revenue from advertising aimed at those soft gaming players.

“We’re seeing advertising sponsorship in-game,” said Ken Crouse, Senior Director, Product Strategy of CryptoLogic, an award winning provider of online gaming content, during a seminar for industry professionals at last year’s Asian i-Gaming Conference & Expo in Macau.

“These are revenue models that the video game industry has been working on for a number of years and starting to put in place,” he added.