Digital Content Forum Report

China International Digital Content Forum opened yesterday in Beijing.

The meeting will last three days. More than 260 companies around the world are presenting their products includes hundreds of games at the exhibition.

Official from the Culture Department of the State Council, Yuzhu Liu gave a speech titled "Policy and guidance for the development of internet culture products in China".
Put propagandas aside, here are some interesting quotes from his talk:

"Currently, the most developed culture products are internet cafe and online gaming. Web distributed applications and online cartoons are also showing good prospect. Internet cafe has become a huge market category in China's culture market. There are more than 110,000 internet cafes nationwide with more than 5 million online computer terminals. The jobs created are also surpassed 50,000. It has special contributions to the nation's economy as well as information modernization. They also evolved themselves as a culture industry. Now, the internet cafes in China are progressing to get rid of their poor images from several years ago, and to become more mature and conform to social values. We can proudly say that China's internet cafes are the best in class, best in services in the world.

Online gaming is also like a "wild horse" in last two years. We all know that online gaming only started in 2000 in China. The market size in that year was only 30 million yuan(~$3.7 million dollars). Last year, it is already reached 3.6 billion yuan($400 million). In only a few years, it expanded by 100 fold. It also stimulated the development of related industries. In 2004, online gaming contributed 15.07 billion yuan($1.8 billion) to the communication industry. The contribution to the IT industries was about 6.37 billion yuan($800 million dollars).

New demands on opening the market has already been put on agenda for the next round trade negotiations. Recently, US commerce, Hong Kong district government, US software association, Canada, Britain, as well as US embassy have contacted us for further demands on entering development of online gaming.

Fee-based downloading services are the fastest growing industries of last year. By 2005, 20% of all sales will be carried through network downloading.

However, according to industry analysts, worldwide users of network distributed applications are still less than 100,000. Currently, the majority of our internet services are still free. The competition for market share are still higher than the need for making profit. So the network distributed applications are still in early developement stage."

Both Liu and another official from the Department of Information Industry of the State Council pledged their support for further development of the online gaming industries.

Beijing Exhibition Center

Sony, The 9, Netease, SNDA, and Perfect World are the few bright spots among the exhibitors.

Sony displays Play Station

Shanda's huge booth makes King's presence felt

The "9" with it's top-ranked World of WarCraft

The "9" reveals it's next big hit "KLXY"(joyful journey to the west)
and hope it will take away the spotlights from Netease's 2 XYs.

Already owns second-ranked MHXY(dreamin journey to the west) and another blockbuster DHXY II(journey to the west II), Netease is also presenting it's next big hit Datang

Perfect World is already gaining attentions not only in China, but worldwide

Huatong

see also: Google interested in investing in China's online gaming