NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

By Coco Liu

Michael Xu was spellbound. Soon after visiting relatives in China in 2017, the game developer from Toronto decided to fly halfway around the world — again — to learn how to build games for the Chinese app WeChat.

“WeChat is huge in China,” Xu told the Nikkei Asian Review during an interview conducted through, well, WeChat. The 28-year-old Chinese Canadian was impressed by the way his relatives used the same software to do everything from paying bills and chatting with friends to ordering food. “Even my 88-year-old grandfather is a master user of WeChat,” he said. “He uses it to call me and share photos and articles all the time.”

So when Xu resolved to tap into the Chinese video game market last year, his first move was to take a WeChat programming course in Shanghai. “All the people in China are already on WeChat,” Xu said. “It’s much easier to get them to play our games on WeChat, instead of asking users to download another app.”

Photo courtesy of lau rey.