China’s Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) has just launched its first-ever mobile gaming title called My Country. It’s a city building game, so far only on Android in Shanda’s Chinese release, which allows users to build up their city’s landscape, transport infrastructure, and economic business.
Like many such casual games, My Country is free-to-play but with a number of tasks and goodies that can be expedited if you pay real cash for some in-game virtual currency. But if you’ve got the patience to build up your initial factories (pictured below) quite slowly so that they eventually start making your municipality a bit of revenue, then you could always play it for free.
The game was developed by San Francisco-based Game Insight and has already been released on numerous platforms. But this week’s launch by Shanda as a publisher sees it arriving in China fully localized into Chinese and with local payment options. The game already has 11.2 million players around the globe, and that number could be about to get a huge bump from new Chinese mobile gamers.
Shanda Games is best known for developing and licensing/operating major MMO titles like Trion Worlds’ Rift, or its own World Zero. This marks its first foray into mobile gaming. At the end of 2011, China’s mobile gaming market was a fairly small part of the nation’s wider $7.1 billion gaming sector, but it’s one that’s fast-growing.
If these kinds of community building games are your thing, you might also like EA’s The Sims Social, which recently arrived in China on Tencent’s Qzone platform.
My Country is not on the Google Play store, so Android gamers will need to download it from Chinese app store GGG.cn instead, or from the title’s new Shanda homepage.
[Source: Game Insight blog]
