Alibaba makes another push into games with social gaming platform

Alibaba revealed today that it’s behind a new social gaming platform called KTplay, which has been in quiet beta for a few months. It’s currently running only in China, but it will later expand to gamers around the world.

Alibaba has teamed up with Yodo1, a Beijing-based mobile game publishing startup, to create KTplay (pictured above).

Spencer Liu, KTplay’s chief product officer, explains to Tech in Asia that it’s a way for game developers to “turn single-player games into a social experience.” Developers can add KTplay into their games, allowing them to engage users. For game fans, it gives a new social network devoted to games and gaming tricks and tips.

In its present form, KTplay has more features than Apple’s Game Center or Google Play Games, but it doesn’t include any ecommerce elements, despite the Alibaba connection. However, that could change. Alibaba representative Rachel Chan explains:

We are open to explore cooperation between KTplay and our other businesses including Alimama for advertising/marketing, cloud computing, and Alipay for payment services.

Alibaba has tinkered with games before, including distributing apps and games on its Taobao shopping marketplace. The company also invested US$120 million into US-based Kabam a few months ago.

Ecommerce potential

For now, the new platform is focused on community discussion around games. “Discussions are just the beginning,” says Liu. “It can also extend to social gifting of in-game items.”

Henry Fong, the founder and CEO of Yodo1, says that gaming is an area that Alibaba “can’t afford not to be involved in.” The deal, which sees Alibaba invest an undisclosed sum in the KTplay subsidiary, involves Alibaba throwing in some of its own useful resources, such as in-app analytics from Umeng, the Chinese startup it acquired last year.

Fong adds that “in the future, [KTplay can] merge the worlds of ecommerce and marketplaces and gaming,” and that it has “lots of potential” in this area when allied with Alibaba’s Alipay.

At present, most gamers who trade or sell their in-app items do so offline. Fong foresees that the new platform could expand into a sort of “gaming marketplace” for those transactions.

Alibaba versus Tencent – round 9

This social gaming venture is a new battlefront in the ever-expanding war between Alibaba and Tencent, China’s two biggest web titans.

KTplay will bring a social network to popular games like Ski Safari.

Tencent runs WeChat, the popular messaging app that expanded into social gaming in August last year. Though WeChat can lay claim to nearly half a billion active users, its social gaming platform is more modest in size, mostly populated by Tencent-published games. The first foreign-made game to hit WeChat arrived a year after the platform’s launch when a special WeChat edition of Candy Crush Saga launched in China.

The Yodo1 and KTplay team emphasize that its own tech is a lot easier for game developers to access, in contrast to the special deal needed to get a game onto the social gaming elements of messaging apps like WeChat or Line.

Alibaba has its own – albeit struggling – messaging app in the form of Laiwang. That has also rolled out social games and could see a much-needed boost from its new joint venture.

See: Here’s everything Alibaba invested in or acquired so far in 2014

Alternative to Facebook

The mantra behind KTplay as a social network is “Don’t take me out of the game,” says Fong. And so the community appears as a pop-up within supported games and needs no additional app. It features the same four tabs in each game. The idea is that it’s simple and also familiar to keen gamers who might use the social aspects across a number of titles.

The startup says that it’s a more effective community – for both game makers and players – than using places like Weibo or Facebook to discuss games. “Developers are seeing 10 times more engagement than on Weibo,” Liu claims.

There are already 50 games that have been using KTplay during its beta, with an anticipated 700 more coming “in the next few quarters,” including big-name titles like Ski Safari.

All this will eventually go global, explains Fong. “There are three phases to going global. We’re still at phase one now in China,” he says.

This post Alibaba makes another push into games with social gaming platform appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Alibaba makes another push into games with social gaming platform