Isle Li, an online Chinese chess enthusiast and a college student in Beijing, has played more than 20,000 games in the past four years.

Li says he spends at least four hours a day on Ourgame.com, the most popular chess and card game website.

Now he does not even need to log into the Internet to pay games anymore. His mobile phone has become a new game-playing channel.

To play, he needs to pay about 5 yuan (60 US cents) a month to Ourgame and can choose to compete with either other Internet or mobile players.

Although Li is still a pioneer in playing mobile chess games, it is predicted by some industrial analysts there will be more than 1 million such players by the year's end.

Analysys International, a domestic market research firm in Beijing, also forecasts the mobile game market will reach about 600 million yuan (US$72 million) this year.

"Mobile games will become another gold mine for telecom operators and service providers," said Zhang Ying, a senior telecom analyst with Analysys International.

He believes the emphasis of the two Chinese mobile operators - China Mobile and China Unicom - on data services will be a big driving force for mobile games.

The two companies, both with more than 100 million subscribers, have been seeing a slowdown in both the number of subscribers and the average revenue per user.

At the same time, the prices of their voice services have also fallen sharply due to fierce competition.

So data services, with stable and high revenues, have become the focus for the operators.

Zhang said short messaging services (SMS), a key data application, have also slowed with a large basis after more than three years of high growth, so new services like mobile game will become very important for both operators and service providers.

While mobile games based on SMS had the dominant share in the mobile game market last year with 300 million yuan (US$36 million) of revenues, new games on 2.5-generation platforms like WAP, JAVA and BREW, showed strong momentum this year.

Sina Corp, a NASDAQ-listed Chinese Internet portal and the second biggest SMS game provider last year, also gave a lot of attention to new formats of games.

Wang Ning, a mobile game product manager of Sina Corp, said his company partnered with French game developer Gameloft in March to introduce the latter's game to China and enrich its product lines.

He said the average daily downloads for some games from Sina's website reached 10,000 by the end of April.

The company's revenues from mobile games also exceeded 250,000 yuan (US$30,000) that month.

Ourgame also released four games in January and is planning to transplant more games on its website to mobile phones.

However, Zhang from Analysys, said since mobile games are also heavily dependent on support from mobile operators as well as phone makers, building a healthy industrial chain is critical for the business to prosper.

At present, only some big international mobile phone makers are capable of designing phones embedded with online games and they are much bigger than mobile service providers like Sina and Ourgame. Fighting for their support is an important work for service providers.

(China Daily 06/05/2004 page5)