Kwalee, a UK-based developer and publisher of hyper-casual mobile games, is expanding into China to find more growth opportunities in the biggest mobile gaming market in the world.
The company, headquartered in Leamington Spa, UK, will open a new Beijing office, with Penny Qian, who had worked at Applift, Tencent, and Applovin, being its first hire for the China team as Head of Business Development.
"China is the biggest mobile gaming market in the world, and while we have been able to grow at a great rate to this point, the China office presents an opportunity to become even more of an international brand and it was clear it was the next step we needed to make," the company's CEO David Darling CBE said in an emailed statement sent to cnTechPost.
Kwalee’s move comes as China’s mobile game market is seeing rapid growth.
In the first half of this year, China's gaming market generated sales revenue of 139.493 billion yuan, up 22.34 percent year-on-year, according to a report released during the 18th ChinaJoy in August.
China's game market sees nearly 140 billion yuan in sales in H1 , 75% from mobile games
The report stated that the number of online game users in China is nearly 660 million.
In the first half of 2020, the actual sales revenue of China's self-developed games in the domestic market reached 120.14 billion yuan, up 30.38% year-on-year.
The sales revenue of mobile games reached 104.673 billion yuan, accounting for 75.04% of the total market revenue.
The aim of the new Chinese arm of Kwalee is to help grow the brand and its games presence in the region, while also enabling it to work much closer with key local partners, it said.
Kwalee is looking to hire 5-10 employees within the next year for the Beijing office.
Kwalee employs more than 80 people and is led by gaming entrepreneur David Darling. Recently, Kwalee was named among the world's top 50 mobile game makers by PocketGamer.biz.
Kwalee hopes its presence in China will help build upon the success of its current titles, including Line Up: Draw the Criminal, Bake it and OverTake, in addition to extending the reach of its publishing team, who have already worked with third-party developers from the likes of Russia and Brazil.
(Line Up: Draw the Criminal / Photo from Play Store)
