Report: Surging Growth Coming For Southeast Asian Game Markets

Preliminary results released today by the Asian game market analysts at Niko Partners suggest the combined market for video games in seven Southeast Asian game markets could be worth $1.7 billion by 2014. That number would represent a 14 percent compound annual growth rate and an 85 percent overall increase for the projected $917 million 2010 game market across Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. While Vietnam and Taiwan are expected to be the most significant of these growing gaming markets in the next few years, the 64 million current gamers in the report's seven countries are expected to show a surge of interest in online PC gaming, partly due to the influence of nearby China. "We recognize that China has influenced the online game industry throughout Asia, and in some countries that influence has been quite important," said Lisa Cosmas Hanson, managing partner of Niko Partners. "Our understanding of the online games segment and of Chinese online gamers and the overall video game market in China provides Niko a unique and relevant vantage point to analyze these additional emerging markets in Asia." A Niko study from earlier this year estimated that China's online game market would comprise a whopping 141 million players and $9.2 billion in revenues by 2014. The Asian game market in general is an increasingly important part of the worldwide MMO industry, driving most of the sector's projected 60 percent growth in 2010, according to an August Strategy Analytics report.