Chart of the Week

Chart of the Week: Chinese players prefer apps over web gaming

Battle of the platforms

Chart of the Week: Chinese players prefer apps over web gaming
Released last week, there's plenty of interesting information from RenRen Games' survey of 1,040 Chinese netizens aged 15 to 64.

Organised through mobile ad network Ader's 7X24 platform, the respondents - who access the internet via mobile and tablet devices - were quizzed about a bunch of topics.

How do your gamers game?

When asked what they usually do with their mobile device, communications - notably instant messaging (70 percent) -was highest, followed by news (60 percent) and online music (56 percent).

Online gaming was ranked fairly low at 31 percent - around the same level as online banking or email.

But when asked about mobile app usage, games came out at 65 percent, second only to social communications at 77 percent.



It's a marked difference given that the 'mobile gaming' was the end point of each question, the only difference being the path to it. Of course, Chinese mobile users prefer not to incur high data costs so always-on online games (whether web or app-based) are not popular.

Yet, in both situations, it's also clear to see that the combination of games and social communications will be an explosive combination; something that the market is looking to as Tencent commercially launches the game platform element of its WeChat social messaging service.

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.