On November 9, Tencent and Skyworth Digital announced their strategic partnership with the launch of miniStation. At the same time, Skyworth Digital announced its plans to expand its business into the gaming market which is aligned with their strategy of providing more advanced home entertainment experience to the Chinese public.

Entering the game market via miniStation

Tencent sees gaming as a strategic evolution of their offering and uses the miniStation as the vehicle to capture additional revenue from gaming. According to available data, most of the game players are active online between 6 PM to 10 PM, which shows a trend of transforming toward living room gaming. Baocheng Chang, vice president of Skyworth Digital, said: “The best way for people to enjoy a superior gaming experience is through the big TV screen. However, in China, big TV-screen gaming still in its infancy.”

Skyworth has been a focus on big-screen service and experience and has continuously made improvements on big-screen 3D gaming, social interaction, content integration, operating experience, TV payment, etc,.

As the core strategic partner for miniStation, Skyworth Digital and Qualcomm will jointly launch a premium miniStation for the new high-end micro gaming market.

miniStation has every possibility

In North American and European countries, a game player only costs around 1 per cent of an average family income. However, a 3000 RMB game player might be a burden to most Chinese families. China has 1.3 billion people. Among the population, 400 million are mobile game users. These users are familiar with cellphone game control systems. miniStation enable people to enjoy the wonderful gaming experience on a big TV screen, with a similar control system to cellphones, making it easy and affordable for Chinese game players.

Many Chinese game developers have already confirmed to join in the development of miniStation. Besides games offered by Tencent, people will also be able to enjoy games from other operators, for example, Gameloft.