The Chinese New Year is on the nose, and on this occasion – a few words from analysts from Niko Partners about what awaits the mobile gaming market of China in 2015.
The coming year will undoubtedly be interesting for the industry. The number of Chinese people with access to mobile Internet will continue to increase. This means that the mobile gaming market will continue to grow, and faster than the PC games market, which is more hardcore, and therefore intended for a narrower audience.
Revenue from mobile games will also increase, while the pace of smartphone sales will decrease. This conclusion can be made based on data for previous periods: 579 million smartphones were sold in 2013, and 452 million in 2014.
The tendency to create projects based on existing IP will continue and, moreover, will increase, since mobile players, especially when it comes to the casual segment, prefer familiar plots and recognizable characters.
Card battlers are likely to lose popularity. But first-person shooters and MMORPGs are not.
As for large Chinese corporations, we can expect that Tencent will almost completely go into mobile, but Alibaba will focus on games for set-top boxes, in particular, on Android-based OTT consoles. The number of large transactions – mergers, acquisitions and acquisitions – will decrease in 2015, simply because the number of large companies that can be bought is not infinite.
Summing up, in the coming year, the Chinese mobile gaming market will remain one of the most promising in the world – stagnation is not threatening it yet.
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