Tag: mobile games

Mobile gaming regulation concerns erupt in China after private video leak

| October 13, 2014

Chinese mobile game app published private user videos online.

It should come as no surprise that mobile gaming apps are popular in China, but one Chinese mobile app in particular called “FengKuang LaiWang” has recently received a lot of media attention after it was discovered that the mobile game leaked more than 35,000 user videos online, including video clips of users who were in their underwear or in the nude.

The videos were posted without player’s consent on Youku.

FengKuang LaiWang essentially translates to “Crazy Dealings”, and is a popular charade-style game available for download via Alibaba’s Laiwang chat service. The game is not unlike the mobile game “Heads Up!” that can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store. Basically, in this game, players take turns trying to guess the word that appears on the screen while other players act it out. Players video themselves acting out a charade and share the video privately with friends.

According to “Beijing News”, thousands of these videos wound up on the game’s Youku account, which is a Chinese video platform similar to YouTube, unbeknownst to the players. Some of the videos revealed players, who took the game to another level, wearing very little or nothing at all. Many players did not realize that their videos were being recorded and published to Youku.

Concerns regarding mobile gaming regulation resulted after the incident.

Mobile Gaming - Private Videos leaked on YoukuAs soon as the privacy blunder was reported by local media, the video-sharing feature of the game was disabled and the games account on China’s leading online video site was closed. Zhejiang Zhile Network, the game’s publisher, released a statement that said as soon as it realized the game was uploading video content without player consent it shut down the video-sharing function. The company apologized in a public statement saying that the game failed to inform users that their activities would be streamed online.

The company said that “Per this mistake, we, as the developer and operator of the game, apologize sincerely to affected users.” However, despite what happened, after news about the leak broke, downloads of FengKuang LaiWang have increased.

Nonetheless, as was noted by the “South China Morning Post”, the leak has resulted in people within the Chinese game industry questioning the safety and security of the mobile gaming regulations.

Mobile Gaming is revealed to be a daily pastime for many Android users

| October 8, 2014

A new report from Flurry reveals that, globally, consumers play games for an average of 37 minutes every day.

The mobile analytics firm’s study analyzed 60,000 Android devices and discovered that of all these users across the globe, gamers in the United States are the ones who spend the most time engaged in mobile gaming, averaging 51.8 minutes each day, compared to other countries involved in the study that averaged the shortest times, which were France at 30.1 minutes and China at 28.6 minutes.

Mobile game playing has experienced significant growth in the U.S. over the past three years.

The growth in the mobile gaming sector in the U.S. is largely due to a greater number of consumers in the country adopting smartphone and tablets. With the bigger screen size of these gadgets, almost 50 percent of console gamers began using these devices last year. This is a 15 percent increase from 2011.

In terms of the average time (in minutes) gamers spend playing Android games in a day, the study found that Germany was the country that spent the second most time gaming after the U.S., averaging 47.1 minutes, daily. Also above the global average are Russia (40.8 minutes) and Italy (38.5 minutes). A marginal difference was found between South Korea (36.2 minutes) and India (33.4 minutes). It is speculated that the reason for this is due to the fact that India experienced the industrial revolution at a comparatively later stage and that low-end smartphones have become extremely popular in the nation. What was quiet surprising, however, was that the UK was one of the countries where the lowest average amount of time was spent, at just 32.4 minutes.

Mobile gaming apps that appear to be the most popular are Arcade & Action games.

mobile gaming reportThe Global Mobile Gaming App Industry 2014 and distribution of Android gaming apps report from Flurry also looked at the distribution of gaming app sessions by country and category. It learned that while Arcade & Action games were at the top of the list, Casual games followed close behind. The study found that:

• Arcade & Action games were the most popular in South Korea (74 percent) and China (53percent).
• Brain & Puzzle games topped the charts in Italy (55 percent) and Germany (53 percent).
• Casual games were relatively popular among all countries, but were particularly popular in Russia (56 percent) and Brazil (53 percent).

Jarah Euston from Flurry commented about the report’s Android mobile gaming findings saying that “it turns out that while we all speak the language of gaming, distinct dialects exist.” Euston added that “With the global gaming market expected to reach $24B by 2017, there’s plenty of room for both international standard-bearers and local delicacies alike.”