Three major operators enclosure mobile games

The domestic handset game market's good "money" finally attracted the parties "covet", China Mobile first announced will unite Unicom and the telecommunication to rob the handset game to pay.

On the afternoon of April 22, China Mobile developer community announced: "China Mobile internet base to work together with China Telecom love games and Unicom Broadband Online Co., Ltd. will be officially released on May 17, 2013 converged Billing SDK", and said that "the integration of the Billing SDK will fully support the three major operators of the charges paid, Achieve a development, comprehensive coverage, a little access, common release.

The announcement immediately sparked widespread concern in third-party developers, the domestic media and the industry. To developers, how much does the "Converged Billing SDK" help? Is it possible to impact the existing Third-party gaming application stores in China? What do the three operators intend to do? The author investigates the above problems.

Direct positive "prop charge" type mobile game

At present, the domestic handset game market mainly divides into the third party market and the manufacturer pre-installed, the operator channel, as well as qq/micro-letter platform. For most developers, the operator has the longest platform flow and the slowest return, and the developer complains the most.

A third party developer in China said to the author, large and medium-sized game development companies and operators to cooperate faster, such as a single game access to China Mobile gaming platform for about 1.5 months, large-scale on-line online games audit will need 3 months to half a year; China Telecom needs a short time, but the benefit is general; Wait for the longest time.

For operators to launch the "Converged Billing SDK", the developer said: "For game developers is a good thing, but" for large developers to help is not big, for small developers may save 40% audit time.

Le Tease CEO Chen Yuyu to the author that the use of an SDK can be unified access to the three major operators of the payment, the developer is a positive. But this process has yet to be validated, the three major operators also need to deal with the various payments of the centralized interface.

Hot cool company related people said, "Yesterday just received the notice, also need to see the details and specific implementation of", but generally speaking, the integration of Billing SDK for Internet-dependent, ARPU in more than 100 yuan "heavy game" impact is not small, but will be directly beneficial to rely on small payments of props and fees games.

Operator platform user accounted for nearly 30%

For most developers, third-party app stores have a low level of collaboration and a huge user download. However, due to the lack of supervision, the application of piracy problem is serious, and there are malicious suction charges.

And the advantage of carrier platform and billing is the user billing ability, network support, high activity and payment rate. But the user ARPU relatively low, the developer to the operator ability understanding insufficiency, the common existence "difficult to deal with" the cooperative psychology.

In the author's multiple telephone lines, most developers mention the "micro-gaming platform." While Tencent has repeatedly said "no timetable", the game business, which is Ningyu by Tencent's chief operating officer, has apparently made developers "love and Hate". The advantage of micro-credit platform is that the user is huge, the operation support mode of mobile game is mature than the operator, but the biggest problem lies in the developers ' "Shanzhai" ability and history.

By now, nearly half of the domestic Android gaming users have come from third-party markets and pre-installed manufacturers, but the ratio of carriers ' platforms in the first quarter of this year is rising rapidly. According to the data provided by the touch-control technology, the current operator platform user account is close to 30%. And China Mobile, the data show that "fishing up to 2" operator platform monthly income has exceeded tens of millions of games monthly revenue of 1/3.

Three big operators: "Money" or "dream"

China Mobile on the afternoon of April 22 first announced the "Convergence of the Accounting SDK" news, but Unicom and the Chinese telecom related to this objection, and responded that "China Mobile has no rules."

China Telecom insiders said, in fact, this thing "is the first touch-controlled technology proposed, the three operators at the same time to promote." It was originally scheduled to be announced in early May, but China Mobile's unexpected announcement gave the impression that it had become the project's leader.

From this perspective, the three operators in the "Integrated Billing SDK," the views are not uniform. China Mobile, which has a clear advantage in terms of platform input, application and number of users, is intent on leading the converged billing project, but the Chinese telecom and Unicom are clearly not buying it.

However, the "Converged Billing SDK" is also considered to be the operator in the face of "pipeline" forced to take the "holding group heating", and mobile gaming platform has become operators and Tencent and other Internet companies new "battlefield."

For operators, the application of micro-credit Ott has become a real threat. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Information, China Mobile users in January-March this year, the local phone calls fell 5.5%, mobile long-distance call time down 5.6%, the average number of points to the point of text messages dropped 11.2% year-on-year. At the same time, China Mobile Internet access to the first monthly traffic breakthrough 100M, reached 117.4M, an increase of 30.4% per cent.

Industry believes that in the long run, operators "pipeline" has become inevitable. Verizon, the US operator, announced last year that it had abandoned its app store, as most of the Internet base projects launched by the country's three major operators were "marginalized". But the mobile game because can collect the flow fee and the game to divide at the same time, has become the domestic three big operators bullish "gold mine". As one of China Mobile operators said: "If each user Arpu 10 yuan per month, for 1.1 billion mobile users, this will be a very large game industry."

However, the "Converged Billing SDK" is only a common billing model, compared to Alipay and other methods do not have much advantage, and increasingly by the micro-credit platform, Millet Game Center, such as the competition of Internet enterprises. Does not unite the three big operators finally can "break siege"? The author is not optimistic.