Revenues in the Chinese gaming market are on the up, with the market collecting about 105 billion yuan ($15 billion) in the first half of the year, an increase of 5.2% on the same period last year.Â
The report was produced by data company JoyNews Corporation and the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association.
They noted a trend for targeting new markets – such as a female audience – and also developing new technologies. E-sports revenues saw an increase of around 16% in the first half of this year. E-sports revenues topped 41 billion yuan ($6 billion).
Liu Huicheng, president of Ourpalm, a leading web and mobile game developer in China, said: “for any game developers, if you want to be competitive, you’d have to improve and upgrade the technology. Then there’s innovation. And only with innovation can we offer better designs or more new games to our users.”
Li Shuang, art director of Giant Network, said: “we are targeting the global market starting with R&D. For example, Superpop&Lollipop – one of our company’s most popular games, has an internationalized background story, and the characters also have rather exotic looks.”
The report notes that the number of Chinese game users was up to 530 million, a year-on-year increase of 4.0%. However, the JoyNews report suggests that the market is becoming saturated, and rises may level off.
The mobile market continued to grow in H1, however growth has slowed significantly. Web gaming was down 14.6% in this period, continuing a trend of decline for the past 3 years.
A recent report from Goldman Sachs says that eSports like Fortnite will be as popular as the NFL, as video gaming moves into the mainstream with a projected 300 million viewers by 2022. Tencent has invested heavily in eSports, in a bid to develop a domestic RMB 100 billion ($14.6bn) esports business.
League of Legends image by Riot Games
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e34517a4d79457a6333566d54/share_p.html
