Photo: IC

Japan's Nintendo Co may lose a window of opportunity to introduce its hit mobile game app Pokemon Go to China, experts said on Sunday, as knockoffs are eroding its access to the world's largest game market.

The top free game in China on the Chinese iOS App Store over the weekend was City Spirit Go, a Chinese-developed mobile game app that has been widely perceived as a copycat version of Pokemon Go.

The operators of the Chinese app had to increase their number of servers by 10 times in three days to meet increasing demand, news portal sohu.com reported on Wednesday.

City Spirit Go duplicates several features of the Japanese game, such as being location-based, but there is no augmented reality in it yet, allowing players to discover and capture virtual spirits all over the cartoon map. It was launched in March, a few weeks after Nintendo rolled out a Japanese-only beta test of its Pokemon Go.

The developer of the copycat, Shenzhen Tanyu Interactive Technology Co, couldn't be reached for comment during the weekend. 

The absence of the long-awaited Pokemon Go in China is a factor in the popularity of City Spirit Go, She Shuanglin, a Beijing-based independent virtual reality expert, told the Global Times Sunday.

Pokemon Go is taking the world by storm, although it is now only available in Australia, the US, UK, Germany and New Zealand.

Chinese gamers' appetite for Pokemon Go appears to be huge. The game had amassed over 279,000 fans on the country's leading online group discussion platform Baidu Tieba by press time on Sunday.

China's mobile games market generated $7 billion revenue in 2015, becoming the largest for mobile games worldwide, according to market research firms Newzoo and TalkingData. 

Still, it is unclear when Nintendo will bring the game to China.

"The landing of Pokemon Go in the Chinese mainland confronts a longer and tougher road than in other countries and regions," She said, making reference to new rules from China's media regulator.

In June, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television ordered every mobile game to gain its approval before publishing in China. Also, Google's mapping service, on which the game is significantly based, is blocked in the mainland, forcing Nintendo to make more effort to seek a suitable mapping service provider in the market, She added.

Given this situation, more copycats are expected to come out in the following months, which She noted that would easily get gamers in China accustomed to and then bored with the gaming mode adopted by the likes of Pokemon Go.

However, not everyone like the ideas of knockoffs, especially for those who grew up watching the Pokemon cartoons in the 1990s.

A Beijing-based white-collar worker surnamed Jiang said the copycats are "stupid."

Pokemon is deeply rooted in the popular imagination and knockoffs won't prosper for long, Jiang told the Global Times Sunday.

Lawyers also concerned about the prospects of those knockoffs in China.

"Those copycats are facing the risks of being sued by Nintendo for the infringement of intellectual property rights," Zhao Zhanling, legal counsel with the Internet Society of China, told the Global Times Sunday.

Nintendo has reportedly already shown its unhappiness with black market distribution. According to a report by TorrentFreak, a ­publication that covers copyright news, on Thursday, the Japanese company is trying to crack down on various links to pirated versions of the game.

Like many Pokemon fans who are in unauthorized countries, Jiang downloaded a pirated version of the game from a third-party platform.

Data from research firm SimilarWeb showed that 6.8 percent of all Android phones in the Netherlands had a pirated version of Pokemon Go installed within just six days of the game's July 6 debut in the US, New Zealand and Australia.

In such cases in China, great efforts are needed to play it, including access to a virtual private network and a virtual GPS that can pretend they are located in the US or Australia.

Through Taobao.com, an online platform of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, gamers can even buy IDs for Apple's Australia-based app store for 1.5 yuan (22 cents) so as to play Pokemon Go.

As a Pokemon fan, Jiang thinks that she will gradually stop playing the game if the official one cannot enter China.

"My Pokemon Go is based on the US map, which sometimes can't run easily while I'm wandering around cities in China," she said.