BEIJING - China will be the world's biggest mobile game market by 2015, surpassing the United States, according to Ray Cheng, president of Glu Mobile Inc for the China market.

Glu Mobile, a top three mobile game publisher for smartphones and tablet devices worldwide, is about to see its business expand dramatically in China between 2012 and 2013, Cheng told China Daily.

"In a few years, Glu Mobile's advantage with smartphone games may begin to bear fruit in China because the country's construction of third generation (3G) mobile network sets is about to enter a more mature stage," Cheng said.

Compared with other Chinese mobile game producers, who started to develop games for smartphones about six months ago, San Francisco-based Glu Mobile has gained wide experience in creating games on faster, data-loaded 3G mobile networks in different countries.

The smartphone game Gun Bros, which Glu Mobile launched last October, was highly popular worldwide and has been downloaded more than 5.6 million times so far. It ranks among the top five free mobile games on the lists of various application stores.

Glu Mobile expanded into the global market quickly after it was founded in 2001 and entered China in 2007. The company spent $20 million in acquiring Mig China Co Ltd, a leading Chinese mobile game developer, at the end of 2007.

The acquisition helped Glu Mobile to get a license to publish games on the platform of China Mobile Ltd, the world's biggest telecom carrier by subscriber numbers. In addition, the deal brought with it people talented at devising games and enabled Glu Mobile to establish its largest research and development center with 110 employees in China.

"More than half of our revenue was created by markets outside North America last year, and Glu Mobile is optimistic about future growth in the China market," Cheng added.

Among 859 million Chinese cell phone users, there were more than 130 million people playing mobile games in 2010, up 52.1 percent over the previous year, according to a report from domestic research firm Analysys International.

Cheng said Glu Mobile hopes to make its games more localized in the future. He discovered Chinese players love chatting and delivering opinions about games. Furthermore, Chinese people enjoy games with many competing participants.

"We report these findings to our US headquarters periodically so they can develop updates accordingly," Cheng said. The company introduced its creative marketing methods to China. Glu Mobile is good at exploiting Hollywood blockbusters to make money.

Previously, it partnered with leading entertainment brands including DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc, Activision Blizzard Inc and Time Warner Inc to develop movie-related mobile games. In 2008, Glu Mobile launched Batman, while in 2009, the hottest Glu Mobile game was Transformers.

The company developed the first Chinese movie-related mobile game - Wind Blast - in 2010. Although the cooperation achieved limited success last year, Cheng said Glu Mobile is still looking to team up with good Chinese movie-makers in the near future.

"Chinese movies usually focus on stories about love, history or modern life, which are not easy platforms for us to create games on," Cheng said.

Meanwhile, Glu Mobile is considering making use of SinaWeibo, the Chinese edition of Twitter, to promote its games. Cheng declined to reveal further details about this.

China Daily