The mobile world is on the look out to what the smartphone industry giant, Xiaomi, will do next after making a decision of venturing into mobile game scene.
A Xiaomi representative confirmed the information to Tech in Asia.
From making low-cost smartphones and gadgets, Xiaomi's vision of expanding even further has led them to invest in the mobile gaming community.
Being the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer, Xiaomi has its own app store and they have been releasing new games for its Android phones. It even surpasses brands like Lenovo and LG in production quantity because of its large markett of low-budget smartphone users.
According to Tech Times, through a network of partners, Xiaomi was able release 9 new games that includes Xiaomi Poker, Song of Knights and Clash of Kings, among others. These games are branded by a "Mi" logo.
Due to China's ban of all Google services within its jurisdiction, a lot of Chinese startups and software companies built their own versions of Google Apps to compensate for the lack of access to Google's services. The Chinese Google ban was implemented last 2014 and up to this day, they have been trying to reach out and negotiate with censorship issues.
Xiaomi plans to monetize through in-game purchases, like other games available in Google Play. The company has established a virtual currency purchased by users to be used to buy in-app purchases. Mi credits can be easily purchased by linking the user's Xiaomi account to a bank account.
In 2014, third-party developers received total payouts amounting to US$93 million from in-app purchases by Xiao-mi users. It has also been reported that Xiaomi has been receiving monthly revenues of USD$30 million every month from third-party mobile games.
China currently has 386 million active android users. This number is even larger than the total population of the USA and it number attracts a lot of third-party developers to partner with Xiaomi in hopes of boosting their revenue stream.
