Japanese social mobile gaming network DeNA has signed deals with the China's three largest mobile carriers, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom.

The Mobage platform will now be available through the carriers' app stores where Android-compatible smartphone owners will have easy access to Mobage's range of free-to-play games.

China Mobile customers will also benefit from direct carrier billing meaning any Mobage China purchases will be included in their monthly phone bills.

DeNA  plans to extend this service to the other carriers this summer.

Taking over

China Mobile's Mobile Market App store began supporting Mobage China on 1 March and currently boasts 650 million mobile subscribers – 51 million of those being 3G subscribers.

China Unicorn now offers Mobage games on its Wo Store. It has 205 million mobile subscribers, almost a quarter (45 million) of which are 3G subscribers.

Mobage titles landed on China Telecom's Tianyi Space app store late last month, which at the end of 2011 boasted 126 million mobile subscribers, 36 million of those on 3G.

China has over 1 billion phone subscribers, although less than 10 percent are currently on smartphones. It's currently estimated that there are around 25-30 million Android devices in use, although that number is hard to estimate and growing fast. 

Gluing the fragments

Since launching Mobage China back in November 2011, DeNA has been taking advantage of China's lack of an official Google Play Android store by making deals with OEMs and now carriers. 

Last month the Tokyo-based company inked a deal with phone maker Hauwei to highlight Mobage China on HiSpace app store, which is preloaded on its Android devices.

DeNA also partnered with web company Baidu to bring the gaming platform to the popular line of Baidu Yi smartphones.

[source: DeNA]