Data & Research

Chinese web and client game growth halts as mobile gears up

iResearch plots the changes

Chinese web and client game growth halts as mobile gears up

Trying to keep abreast of the Chinese games market is almost impossible.

It changes so quickly that yesterday's secret sauce often sours the following day.

Chinese analyst iResearch has taken a novel approach to keep its eye on the market changes.

It attempts to track the number of developers and titles of various types of games.

For example, it states that in the first half of 2014, there were 4,202 'producers' of mobile games - presumably developers and publishers.

It also says there were 7,806 mobile games during the period.

We can only guess it means this number of games were released.

More generally, it notes that Android is a more popular platform than iOS, which iOS experiencing a slight decline in releases.

PC slows

More satisfying is iResearch's research on web and PC client games, which demonstrates the impact that mobile games - still only around 15 percent of the overall Chinese games market - are having.

For this sector, it notes that during Q2 2014, there were 70 companies spending money advertising PC client games (up from 61 in Q1), while the number of available games rose from 132 to 159.

The number of advertisers for client games is declining

However, the market is in decline compared to 2012.

It's a similar situation in the Chinese web game sector, where growth has totally halted: it's been flat quarter-on-quarter since Q3 2014, although these numbers don't include Tencent, which is the dominant PC gaming platform in China.

There's been a plateau in the number of web games in China

iResearch says that the web game market is now mature and experiencing as "zero-sum effect" as companies fight over the same players.

[source: iResearch]

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.