A third of Chinese residents play mobile games
The number of mobile gamers in China is comparable to the combined population of the United States and Japan. 459 million people play on smartphones and tablets in China, and the total population of the USA and Japan is 455 million citizens.
This is reported by Abacus, an English-language resource about Chinese IT, launched by the oldest Hong Kong edition of the South China Morning Post. Abacus refers to the report of the Chinese Game Publishing Committee and data from the Chinese Gamma Data Research Institute.
According to the publication, the number of mobile gamers in the country has been growing rapidly over the past four to five years. Simultaneously with the surge of interest in mobile, there is a steady decline in the audience of web projects, whose audience is still outnumbering the number of fans of client games.
By the way, the latter, despite a significantly smaller audience, earn much more than games from the web. Of the $15.4 billion that the Chinese gaming industry earned in the first half of 2018, 30% came from client games, and 6.9% from the web. The largest share — 60% — was expected to fall on mobile.
The highest-grossing game is Honor of Kings (Arena of Valor). It’s a mob. Contrary to this, the genre is not the most common. Of the top 100 highest-grossing games in China, only 8.3% of titles belong to it. At the same time, they are responsible for half of the revenues from the esports industry, which earned $33 billion in China in the first six months of this year.
The publication also lists the top-grossing Chinese mobile games on the local market and abroad. Note that they, apart from Honor of Kings, do not have common titles. This obviously indicates the different preferences of the global and Chinese audiences.
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