The turnover of the Chinese market of online games for PC decreased due to the cancellation of licensing last year
Last year’s freezing of game licensing in China made itself felt. According to Niko Partners, revenue from desktop online games in China in 2018 fell to $15.2 billion.
In comparison with similar results for 2017, the drop is not critical. In annual terms, the difference was only $300 million. China is still the largest market for online PC games, followed by more than half of the revenues of the global market for these titles.
Analysts predict China’s growth to $16 billion by 2023, writes Gamesindustry.biz . But in earlier forecasts, the figure of $17.4 billion was called — and China was supposed to reach it by 2022.
Recall that for nine months in China, no licenses were issued to new game titles. Because of this, many Chinese companies have lost sales. The blocking was lifted only at the end of December and at the same time a new application mechanism was introduced.
Now licensing is going on with varying success. The market giants, NetEase and Tencent, did not start issuing IDs immediately. And only in early April, China allowed the first 30 foreign games to be published. Analysts at Niko Partners believe that in 2019 China will approve less than 5 thousand games for publication.
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