Category: Apps

Developer raises $80 million in series C funding

Linekong, a developer of mobile games based in China, has announced that it has raised $80 million in series C funding. China is quickly becoming a prominent market when it comes to mobile app development, especially when these apps have to do with gaming in some way. Mobile apps are quite popular among consumers throughout the country and the demand for more engaging and entertaining applications has been on the rise for some time. The funding that Linekong has managed to acquire may help it compete with the multitude of developers that are already active in China.

Market continues to prove accommodating of mobile games

China’s mobile app development market is saturated. There are numerous organizations that are working to engage consumers with their applications and many of these groups are copying one another in an attempt to find success. It can be difficult for any one company to stand out amongst the crowded market, but Linekong has managed to attract a great deal of attention with its games. The funding that the developer has received will be used to further its growth in the gaming sector through the development of games that have already proven quite popular among consumers.

Linekong intends to release 15 new games this year

Linekong specializes in online role-playing and action games, two genres that are quite popular throughout China. Notably, Action RPGs are the most popular types of games among Chinese gamers, with 64% of consumers spending money on these types of games every month. Linekong intends to release 15 new mobile games this year, the majority of which will adhere to the developer’s genre preferences. Two of the games that the developer plans to release are to be classified as “leisure” games.

China establishes itself as prominent market for mobile games and gaming in general

China’s online games are expected to generate approximately $16 billion in revenue throughout 2014. This makes China one of the most attractive markets in the gaming world. The country is still relatively closed to foreign developers, but the Chinese government recently lifted a ban that had been imposed on foreign console platforms.

The video streaming service saw a tremendous increase in its smartphone and tablet based revenues.

Throughout the holiday shopping season, Blinkbox – a video streaming service owned by Tesco – experienced a massive increase in its mobile commerce sales, to the point that they were considerably greater than their overall online sales.

The company reports that its sales through smartphones and tablets increased by a massive 674 percent.

That said, including its mobile commerce sales they saw an overall year over year increase in their revenues over the same period ( November 25 through January 5) of 245 percent, when taking all channels into consideration. That said, the increase specifically over mobile devices reflects both effective marketing by the company and rapidly growing interest in these gadgets by consumers, when it comes to consuming streaming video content.

Within the mobile commerce sales category at Blinkbox, it was tablets that truly led the way.

As a result of an impressive mobile marketing plan by the company, the largest growth in sales figures was by far over this channel. That said, it was tablets – including the Hudle devices from Tesco, itself – that truly produced the largest share of results. In the three months that led up to Christmas, the company managed to sell 400,000 of their own tablet devices.

Those tablets are sold preloaded with the Blinkbox app. That mobile marketing strategy was certain to have played an important role not only in the number of sales that occurred over mobile devices as a whole, but particularly over tablets. Clearly it was a highly effective strategy, considering the totals that the company was able to achieve during that period.

During that span of time, a very impressive 65 percent of the mobile commerce sales that came in for the Blinkbox video streaming services originated from devices other than laptop and desktop computers. This includes connected TVs, game consoles, set top boxes, and other types of connected device, in addition to tablets and smartphones, of course. This channel has clearly proven itself for the company and it will be interesting to see what direction it chooses to take in order to encourage this growth to continue.