MARKET NEWS

China Has a Large Number of Game Players and a Rapidly Growing Game Market, Driving the Process of Independent Game Development

With the continuous growth of China\'s GDP and the gradual improvement of people\'s life, spiritual and cultural needs have become the main needs of people nowadays. Online games have become one of the main ways of leisure and entertainment for contemporary people, so the market scale of online games has been expanding. The demographic dividend brought by the Internet provides the first stage of support for the growth of game users, with 670 million game users in China in 2021, an increase of 957%.

In the past ten years, China\'s game industry has continued to show stepwise growth. In 2021, China\'s game market sales revenue was $45617.38 million, up $2742.16 million from 2020, up 6.4% year-on-year, maintaining a relatively stable growth rate. In 2021, with the epidemic easing and the weakening influence of the housing economy, the growth rate of China\'s game market sales revenue declined. With the change in China\'s demographic structure, the competition in the future game market will be more intense, and the requirements for enterprises and products will rise.

With the development of 5G in the Chinese market, a new round of technological revolution and industrial change is gaining momentum, so the technical level of China\'s independent original game development enterprises continues to improve, and the innovation ability of independent original game products is generally enhanced. In 2021,  China\'s independent research and development game market sales revenue was 255.819 billion yuan, an increase of 6.51% year-on-year. In terms of the proportion of independently developed games to the revenue of the whole game market, the market share of China\'s independently developed games continues to rise. By 2021, the proportion of China\'s independently developed games has risen to 86.28% in the Chinese market.

Source: GPC, Market Monitor Co., Limited

With the rapid development of mobile Internet and intelligent mobile terminal devices in China, the scale of China\'s game market continues to grow, among which the rapid development of mobile games far exceeds that of end tour and page-game. Since 2016, when mobile games overtook end tour, China\'s game market has gradually established the development trend of mainly developing mobile games. In 2021, the sales revenue of China\'s mobile game market accounted for 76.06%; the revenue of the end tour market accounts for 19.83%; the revenue of the web game market accounts for 2.03%.

Source: GPC, Market Monitor Co., Limited

Overall, the market size of client-side and web games has gradually decreased in recent years. With the popularity of smartphones and the development of the 5G network, mobile games account for a growing market share of the overall game market, which have taken the dominant position in the game industry. China\'s mobile game industry achieved rapid growth during the epidemic, and it is expected to continue to achieve market expansion with good momentum in the post-epidemic period.