A character from a Chinese MMO game.
The 2011 China Game Industry Annual Conference is being held in Xi’an in northern China today and tomorrow, and it kicked off with some eye-watering, huge stats for the industry. The entire gaming market in the country was found to be worth 44.6 billion RMB (US$7.1 billion) in the past year which is an increase of 34 percent over 2010. Online game users reached 120 million, up 9.1 percent since 2010.
These figures include the PC online gaming market, other standalone PC games, and mobile gaming. Note that game consoles are technically not legal in China, so all that goes on in a grey area that’s mostly filled with pirated games and is not included here.
Far and away the biggest sector in gaming in China is PC-based multi-player online (MMO) titles such as Shanda’s (NASDAQ:GAME) World Zero, or Changyou’s (NASDAQ:CYOU) pricey The Deer and the Cauldron.
And so that’s where we’ll start the breakdown of the stats (having remembered that a great deal of overlap in these genres and sectors means that the figures will exceed the above total sum):
-
In 2011, China’s PC online gaming sector – covering MMOs, casual web games, social games – was worth 42.85 billion RMB, up 32.4 percent from the 2010 figure.
-
Domestically-developed online games netted 27.15 billion RMB, an increase of 40.7 percent from the end of last year.
-
A total of 34 Chinese enterprises sold 131 self-developed online games in overseas markets. Sales revenue hit $360 million, 65.5 percent up on 2010.
-
MMO platforms generated 36.7 billion in revenue, an increase of 30.2 percent from last year.
-
Meanwhile, web games accrued 5.5 billion RMB, a hike of 32.4 percent from 2010.
-
The Chinese mobile gaming market doesn’t yet have quite such insane figures, and was worth 1.7 billion RMB in income in 2011, up 32.4 percent.
-
In 2011, the total number of game dev companies in China went up slightly to 164, from 154 last year.
Aside from more gamers, there were also more employees in the industry by the end of last year: 34,00 in total, up from 31,000 in 2010.
By the way, Tencent (HKG:0700) is the king of the online gaming world in China with a cool 30 percent market share by revenue.
[Source: DoNews - article in Chinese]