Mobile, Client, Web Gaming Industries Post Billions in Earnings
The China Gaming Industry Report released today reflects how much money China’s gameplayers have paid for games in 2017. The actual sales revenue of China’s gaming market reached 203.61 billion yuan in 2017, a year-on-year increase of 23 percent.
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The chart shows the decline in revenue growth in the gaming industry since 2014 was reversed this year. In other words, the Chinese gaming industry gained momentum in terms of revenue growth this year.
Of course, most of this is due to mobile gaming. Below, we look at the performance of mobile games, client end games and Web games.
Mobile Games: Bottleneck Approaches
Actual sales revenue of mobile games has exceeded that of client end games since 2016, making them the most important component of the gaming industry.
In 2017, mobile games also performed great, with actual sales revenue of 116.12 billion yuan, up 41.7 percent year on year. Its share of the gaming industry also continued to increase, accounting for 57 percent of total game sales.
Similar with last year, the China mobile gaming market income grew by more than 30 billion yuan in 2017. It confirms that China’s mobile gaming industry is still in a stage of rapid development.
But a bottleneck for mobile games has emerged. The number of mobile game users is showing weak momentum. The number of mobile game users in China reached 554 million, up 4.9 percent from a year earlier, the report said.
Client Games: Less Fluctuation
This year, there were also some signs of recovery in the revenue of client games. The report showed that actual sales revenue of Chinese client games reached 64.86 billion yuan, up 11.4 percent year on year. In terms of user number, the number of Chinese client gamers leveled off in recent years. There was little volatility. The report showed that the number of Chinese client game users reached 158 million this year, up 1.7 percent from a year earlier.
Web Game: Maintains Negative Growth
The market for Web games is not optimistic. After the peak in 2015, actual sales revenue decreased significantly. The number of users has also declined.
According to the report, actual sales revenue for China’s online games market reached 15.60 billion yuan this year, down 16.6 percent from the same period last year, and growth in revenue has been negative for two consecutive years.
Open service volume is also an important indicator for Web games.
According to the report, the volume of Top 10 Web games this year was about 100,000, down 30,000 from 2016. At the same time, first-tier platforms issued a total of about 290,000 game service volume in 2017, a decrease of 16,000 from 2016.
The number of users of China’s Web games also confirmed its declining trend. The report showed the number of Web game users in China reached 257 million, down 6.6 percent year on year, and this year was the fourth consecutive year since the number of Web game users declined.
