Jan. 16 (NBD) -- China's renowned social app WeChat saw an unexpected rapid growth in number of its mini game players, which has exceeded 300 million, with daily active users surpassing 100 million.

WeChat's rollout of its first 17 mini games such as Jump Jump 18 days ago brought its mini programs back into the spotlight. 

The popular chat app introduced its "mini program" platform in January 2017, under which games, store apps and service are provided with no requirement of downloading or installing. 

A third-party mini program developer told NBD that WeChat's mini programs now gain fast growing flow thanks to the launch of mini games.

Some insiders hold the view that the popularity of WeChat's mini games partly signals huge opportunities generated by HTML5 games. But just like typical HTML5 games, WeChat's mini games will face the challenge of user retention and monetization in the future.

Photo/NBD

Though there exist restrictions and limits, mini games are still able to make profits, but WeChat hasn't yet put the commercialization of mini games on the agenda, Sun Chunguang, product director of WeChat games, said in a WeChat open course.

A new category under the mini program, mini games already have a total of 310 million users. 

Sun indicated that mini games are designed to cultivate users' habit of playing mini games in the WeChat ecosystem. The retention rate of the game Jump Jump stood at 65 percent on day one, and slightly dropped to 60 percent on day two and further down to 52 percent on day seven.  

As of the third quarter of 2017, the number of monthly active users of WeChat has reached 980 million, and Sun believes that all those users could be the potential players for mini games.

Planning to launch more mini games in the future, WeChat has made an announcement that it has forged comprehensive strategic cooperation with the leading video game company Ubisoft in the mini game field. Ketchapp, mobile game studio acquired by Ubisoft, will offer several games on the WeChat platform.

It is noted that popular apps especially social ones can bring a large amount of flow to HTML5 applications with low cost. For example, in 2014, WeChat's HTML5 game Catch the Mad Cat achieved a page view of 200 million three days after its launch.

According to a report released by the industry research institution ASKCI Consulting, the number of China's mobile game players topped 554 million last year, representing a year-on-year rise of 4.9 percent. As the large user scale sets a good base for the development of HTML5 games, the HTML5 game market is forecasted to exceed 30 billion yuan (4.7 billion U.S. dollars).

The huge flow of games is believed to generate mouth-watering turnover. But insiders pointed out that now HTML5 games make profits mainly from in-app purchase. Although some phenomenal games could make a turnover of more than 10 million yuan (1.6 million U.S. dollars) or even 100 million yuan (15.5 million U.S. dollars), the profiting model of mini games still hasn't take shape.

WeChat mini games will create profits based on advertisement and prop sale in the future, Sun Chunguang noted, adding that some mini games have been testing the purchase service on Android devices, and more games will be included in the test in the future.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn