China is one of the three largest mobile game markets in the world. The companies of China are among the largest gaming investors. Projects of Chinese developers are increasingly at the very top of Western box office tops. Newzoo recently told about how the Chinese market looks in numbers from the inside in a joint study with TalkingData. We offer a brief summary of it in Russian.
No one disputes that China is a country of big numbers. But even realizing that about 1.3 billion people live in China, it cannot but impress the fact that in the fourth quarter of 2015, a game was launched from more than 1 billion mobile devices in China at least once.
In terms of revenue, the Chinese mobile games market last year became the largest in the world, collecting $ 7.1 billion, Newzoo says. In total, the Chinese gaming industry earned $21.2 billion in 2015.
The number of content providers (as those who publish and develop game content are called in China) by the end of last year amounted to 31.8 thousand companies.
Against the background of the latter, it is curious that the number of games in Chinese stores is “only” 16,500. The largest number of games belong to the casual and card genres. In total, games are responsible for 50% of the content in Chinese mobile app stores.
According to the total MAU, casual and role-playing games are in the lead.
In general, if we talk about the gaming MAU, it grew by 80.4% on the Android platform from the 4th quarter of 2014 to the 4th quarter of 2015, and by 21.7% on the iOS platform.
Just below you can see the top of the most popular (apparently, we are talking about downloads) Android games in China for December last year. From familiar names: Subway Surfers, Temple Run 2, Clash of Clans, Fruit Ninja and Plants vs Zombies 2.
Most of the games released in China last year were RPGs. They accounted for 29.3% of releases. Strategies are in second place – with 21.6%. There is nothing to be surprised about. Despite the fact that casual games traditionally collect a good number of downloads, they are far from role-playing and strategic genres in terms of profitability.
Among the popular settings are not only fantasy, but, for example, the Era of the Three Kingdoms (the real confrontation of the three states on the territory of the present Celestial Empire, which unfolded from 220 to 280 years). 14% of those released in China last year were dedicated to her.
As for the segmentation of China’s mobile gaming audience, there are no surprises here. Almost half of the users are women (and, as a rule, younger than 35 years). In general, the Chinese of the older generation do not really like to play. The share of mobile gamers among those over the age of 46 is 8.7%.
The full version of the report (mentioning the most popular device manufacturers, the most popular game download times in China and top games by genre) can be downloaded from the link below.
Source: Newzoo