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Nov. 28 (NBD) -- China's gaming industry will see fierce competition in the future, and there will be no market for lackluster games, Zhang Xiangdong, chief operating officer of Zhejiang Century Huatong Group Co., Ltd., told NBD in an exclusive interview. 

According to him, intellectual property (IP) is a vital asset to game companies and will become a major driving force in coming years. 

Zhang predicted that revenue generated from IP-based games will surpass that from original IP in 2018. 

The report on the mobile gaming industry April-June 2017 jointly released by GPC and data research institution CNG shows that IP-based games generated revenue up to 17.36 billion yuan (2.63 billion U.S. dollars) over the past 12 months, and that IP-based mobile games accounted for more than 60 percent of the mobile gaming market in China. 

Pan-entertainment relating to IP-centric games will become a new working focus of many game developers, says the report. 

Ye Wei, company secretary of 37 Interactive Entertainment (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., agreed with him, saying to NBD that pan-entertainment based on IP has huge potentials, such as overseas expansion of pan-entertainment games, but it is crucial to protect the value of IP during the process. 

Game developers need to display the real connotation of IP and deliver improvements through games so as to offer users the same feelings brought by literary works or TV series, otherwise the value of IP will be compromised. 

Not only so, work should be done to increase their own brand influence based on the original IP and build their own IP via sustainable operation, Ye added. 

Zhang told NBD that the dividend brought by mobile games and console games will continue, because to users, they can pinpoint the game they want to play from a pool of games through IP. 

However, IP is not everything, he said. 

According to him, product quality contributes 80 percent to a game's success, while IP takes up 20 percent or less. 

Great IP, indeed, will help companies reach out to more users with lower costs and yield higher profits, but this couldn't be achieved without great IP management. In his opinion, IP creation and management will be core competence of game enterprises in the future. 

In light of the development of the gaming market this year, premium gaming products are expected to occupy the lion's share of the market, hence an increasingly higher possibility to see blockbusters, Zhang noted. 

Moreover, he stressed the importance of innovation in game development. 

According to him, game developers that want to gain a firm foothold in the market should either come up with premium games or make impressive innovation.

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn