Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba has announced plans to move into the mobile gaming market as part of a new strategy.
According to the Thenextweb.com website, Alibaba is to set up its own mobile gaming platform in order to challenge Chinese internet firm Tencent.
Tencent has recently been stepping up integration of its games into messaging service WeChat, which brought 570 million downloads in the first three months.
To compete with this, Alibaba is providing its mobile gaming platform service free-of-charge for the first year to game developers that work on single-player standalone games.
Any revenue that a game makes will be split into 70% takings for the developer, a 20% cut for Alibaba and a 10% donation to rural education.
In addition, developers and players will also be able to utilise Alibaba’s unified account where they can manage payments, virtual currency and statistics, as well as access the firm’s Aliyun operating system.
Alibaba said it would “fully support” mobile games created on the platform by marketing and distributing games to its 700 million users on shopping website Taobao.
The plans come after Alibaba’s chief executive officer Jonathan Lu announced last year that the firm would continue its series of big investment to maintain its focus on boosting its services for mobile.
The company has already upped its efforts to promote its chat app, connect with mobile shoppers by offering free data and by giving free smartphones to retailers in China.
