One of the many companies attempting to track the size and growth of the Chinese games market has released its Q1 2015 figures.

IResearch reckons the Chinese PC client, browser and mobile game market was worth around $5.1 billion (RMB 32.1 billion) in the three months between January to March 2015.

This is a rise of 25 percent year-on-year or 8 percent compared to Q4 2014.

In term of sector breakdown, mobile games accounted for 31 percent of revenues, or around $1.6 billion.

This is up from 22 percent market share a year ago, and growing at the rate of 75 percent year-on-year.

Small print

However, what's interesting about iResearch figures is they're not just tracking sales within China.

Indeed, what it is measuring is more nuanced and potentially confusing, as it includes "total revenues China online game enterprises gained from overseas market".

Presumably this is because it's taking data from the financial reports of publicly-owned Chinese companies.

Of course, this is useful for tracking the growth strength of the Chinese games industry, but confusing given this caveat is only mentioned in the small print, especially as at first impressions it seems like iResearch is purely measuring the size of the domestic Chinese games market.

[source: iResearch]