Most Chinese Gamers Are Still Playing On PCs

A report points out that most Chinese gamers still play on PC and not consoles or mobile devices as most gamers all around the world do. China’s video game industry is worth around $13 billion, which represents a 40% increase over the past 12 months.

Breaking the figures down, we see that 64% of the total, $8.7 billion in revenue, was made through client-based PC games, taking up the majority of the gaming market. Aside from PC games, browser games also gained a fairly large amount, namely $2 billion, followed by mobile games with $1.8 billion, and on last place we see social games, with less than $1 billion in revenue. Though the mobile games industry is fairly small, a lot of focus has been placed on it, and investments are being made in developing mobile games.

Companies that received a considerable amount of money to expand its mobile development includes Tencent (for WeChat), Chukong, and Yodo1. But developers are still struggling to figure how to distribute and monetize mobile games, while more than 500 million iOS and Android devices roam the streets of China, and the number is expected to increase to 800 million this year. The top-grossing Android games on the market are reported to generate between $5 million to $10 million each month.

Many developers are focusing on HTML5 for mobile games due to it being supported on all mobile operating systems, and therefore grasping a wider audience. But although the list of top developers in China is still dominated by foreign companies such as Electronic Arts, Gameloft and Glu, Chinese developers are catching up, having a 30% (or $7.8 billion in revenue) increase each year.

Thank you Techcrunch for providing us with this information