In 2014, China was the second leading importer of commercial services in the world. During the years 2000–2013 Chinese imports of computer and information services grew on the average pace of 27%, amounting to 5,94 billion USD in the end of that period (WTO, 2015, p. 4).

Two sectors of computer and information services in China that are developing especially dynamically are the mobile applications market and video game market. The market that seems to be the most promising for foreign imports is the one that emerges from the combination of these two sectors – mobile phone game market. Out of around 1600 companies active in the mobile games sector globally, around 150 are based in the CEE (The Multimedia Research Consultancy, 2008, p. 11). Unfortunately, most of the CEE markets are too small for locally focused content publishers, so most of the game producers try to enter other, bigger markets (Nostromo Wireless, 2012, p. 7). The aim of this article is to verify if the Chinese mobile game market can be treated as an attractive export opportunity for the CEE game developers, and if such expansion is possible.

Theoretical background

Fast development of smartphone and tablet market brought new possibilities for software developers all around the world. A completely new market of applications for mobile devices emerged. A mobile application (or mobile App) is software application that runs on a mobile device (smartphone, tablet, iPod, etc.), that has an operating system supporting standalone software. Mobile Apps can come preloaded on the mobile device, they can also be downloaded by the users from mobile App stores or the Internet (Wang, Liao & Yang, 2013, p. 11). Games are the most popular mobile applications, and mobile phones are potentially dominant game platforms in the future (Feijoo, Gómez-Barroso, Aguado & Scolari, 2012, p. 3). Technological innovations that improve device quality, greater mobile device ownership and broadband transmission offered by wireless communication networks, lead to further development of mobile gaming market (Soh & Tan, 2008, pp. 35–39).

Companies operating on the global mobile game market use many different ways of monetization. The term monetization refers to the method and the ability to generate a revenue (Fields, 2014, p. 21).