Chinese online games market to reach $ 34 billion


04/14/2017

The Chinese online game market reached 177 billion yuan ($ 25.7 billion) in 2016 and, according to iResearch, will exceed 232 billion yuan ($ 33.69 billion) by 2019.



Michael Nugent via flickr
The number of users of mobile online games has grown to 56.3% of the total number of players in 2016 and will exceed 66% by 2019. In 2016, mobile games attracted 521 million users, while online computer games collected only 484m users over the same period.

Tencent became the leader in online gaming revenue by the end of the year and earned 325.2 billion yuan ($ 47.23 billion) in games for PCs and 384.4 billion yuan ($ 55.66 billion) in mobile games. The second position was taken by Netease with revenues of 108.3 billion yuan and 165.1 billion yuan, respectively.

Earlier, another well-known analytical company, IDC, also shared its forecast for the game industry in the country. China keeps going up with the total market volume of $ 30 billion (more to come), and this trend will persist everywhere, from mobile games to consoles, e-sports and VR, analysts say.

In 2016, the total revenue in the Chinese e-commerce market was $ 7.3 billion, of which 34%, or $ 2.5 billion, accounted for the mobile segment. Is it difficult to imagine mobile eSports? And after all, some Hearthstone championships are held on tablets since it's much more convenient. According to IDC forecasts, the mobile segment of eSports in China will grow to $ 7.7 billion by 2020.

IDC says that the volume of foreign revenue from the online games developed in China amounted to $ 7.2 billion, or 41.6% of the total, last year. The lion's share of profits fell on companies such as Youzu, ELEX, and Perfect World. International IT-giants (for example, Facebook) are planning to strengthen cooperation with Chinese gaming companies. Google opened its developer platform for partners from China last year. 

Professional content is predicted to flourish in 2017, which will lead to more intense competition. So far, China has been distinguished by an impressive number of small and medium players, but 2017 may become a year of consolidation. 

Chinese user actively bought a variety of headsets, "inspired" by Samsung Gear VR, in 2016. Even Oculus has already been copied, which potentially expands the audience to hardcore players who are ready to spend money on video games. According to IDC estimates, by 2020 the market for VR games in China will grow several times - to $ 11.5 billion.

Giant projects distributed across 5G networks, tens of millions of users, broadcasts, additional services - all this creates a monstrous load on servers. Companies of the People's Republic of China will continue to switch to cloud services, refusing their own server farms. According to IDC, the annual revenues of the gaming segment of the market of cloud services in China will exceed $ 525 million by 2020.

source: iresearchchina.com