Before the end of summer, games will appear on WeChat
Chinese messenger WeChat enters the gaming market this August after Kakao and LINE.
Mechanics
In the Korean and Japanese Android markets, the main money is earned by projects released with the support of social platforms that allow their users to exchange messages. Their key difference from ordinary messengers is the presence of a full–fledged store inside, where you can buy special emoticons, animated pictures for messages, themes for the application and, of course, games.
In the latter case, the messenger acts as an advertising showcase, helping to increase the visibility of applications. Although it doesn’t come down to that. The application itself, promoted in the messenger store, receives a wide range of tools for interacting with it. And here the closest analogy is Facebook. Through the game, the user can send his friend, with whom he communicates in a particular messenger, a request to “add hearts” or an invitation.
The analogy would be complete if Facebook acted as a publisher on mobile platforms. In other words, part of the money from gaming IAPs goes directly to the creators of the messenger. So only in the last six months, Kakao messenger in Korea earned $311 million on some games.
Today it became known that next month a similar gaming functionality will appear on Chinese WeChat. The first games released to the Chinese market with its support will be: Plants vs Zombies 2, Wolf Moon, Temple Run 2 and Fruit Ninja.
This is a very unexpected choice, since all these projects have already been released in China independently. There is no point in promoting them in China – they are already popular. So, most likely, at the first stage, these games are designed to popularize the gaming component of the service itself, whose user base has more than 400 million subscribers.
The main problem with WeChat today is the lack of a payment system. Tencent cannot decide which is better: to manage payments independently using billing or to start cooperating with local operators. For this reason, the financial success of the future gaming event is still a big question.
A source: pocketgamer.biz
