Alibaba’s ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ hit sees it make a play for lucrative gaming market
- Alibaba says its gaming division has been upgraded to an independent group to parallel the company’s entertainment division
After marquee mobile game Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition hauled in 3.7 billion yuan (US$537 million) during the first half of the year, gaming - once a no-go area - has now become a key part of Alibaba Group Holding’s business.
The e-commerce giant and China’s biggest cloud services provider is also launching its own cloud gaming platform to compete with Tencent Holdings, the world’s biggest games publisher by revenue, and NetEase.
Alibaba told the Post on Monday that its gaming division Lingxi Interactive – which publishes Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition – has been upgraded to an independent business group to parallel the company’s entertainment division.
Alibaba’s cloud gaming platform was revealed at the company’s annual Apsara conference last week, and was described as a business solution for games developers that want to build “new infrastructure”.
Cloud gaming technology leverages high-speed internet connections to allow users to play games straight from servers, without the need to download the game to a local hard drive. Having high capacity, low latency networks is a key requirement and 5G is seen as an industry driver.
This has been an about-face for Alibaba though.
