Looking out for new marts

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Chou's company is one of the fastest-growing in the world's free-to-play market. Kabam currently has seven games that gross more than $1 million a month.

Kingdoms of Camelot, a popular mobile game from Kabam, was the top-grossing application for Apple Inc's iOS platform for all of 2012 and is the seventh highest grossing strategy franchise of all time.

Chou with Kabam said more than half of its revenues come from the North American market, but the company does not have any revenues from Asia yet.

Meanwhile, the rampant piracy in China has also posed a big challenge for international game companies. PopCap, a game developer and maker of popular games such as Plants vs Zombies, did not realize profits in China until it turned the game into a free-to-play model and produced peripheral items such as clothes and dolls.

Facing fierce competition at home, Chinese mobile game developers, on the other hand, have shown a strong willingness to tap into the lucrative developed country market, where the competition is less intensified.

"We believe Chinese developers are the best in the world," Chou said. But there are several major difficulties for them to gain success in overseas markets. First, there are more than 700,000 applications on major mobile operating systems like Android and Apple's iOS. "It is very hard for overseas players to find a certain game out of the pool," he said.

Second, if a Chinese game is not properly translated into the languages as well as culturalized the right way for the Western market, people in the West will not pay for these games, Chou said.

So Kabam announced in mid-April the establishment of a $50 million fund that will enable the best Chinese games to take advantage of Kabam's resources in marketing and distribution to expand to North American and European markets.

"No one needs to give Chinese developers lessons on how to create great gaming experiences, but they do need help in localizing and marketing their games to the Western world," Chou said.

One of the first Chinese games Kabam helped publish in developed countries is called Wartune, a top 10 simulation/life game product in 2010 in China. Kabam started publishing that game in January and, after three months, now commands monthly sales of more than $1 million in Western markets.