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PGC Digital: A brief overview of the Chinese mobile gaming market

TopOn's Harry Yang takes a glance at one of the biggest markets in the world

PGC Digital: A brief overview of the Chinese mobile gaming market

As part of Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #1, Harry Yang, VP of marketing - monetisation/publishers at TopOn, gave a brief overview of the Chinese and global mobile game markets.

Starting with the global market, Yang pointed out that "action games" such as PUBG Mobile and Garena Free Fire are popular and can sell a lot of IAPs, but hypercasual games are also seeing a huge number of downloads around the world.

As for monetisation, Yang noted that Australian eCPMs for rewarded videos are particularly high, and are actually higher on Android than on iOS.

Great potential

Turning his attention to the Chinese market, Yang stated that the total revenue of the mobile market reached $23 billion in 2019, with action and role-playing games dominating the download charts on both Android and iOS.

He also pointed out that eCPMs for casual games in the region are as high as other Tier 1 countries such as the US, but that UA costs are comparably lower, offering higher ROIs.

All that said, Yang did concede that while the Chinese market has a lot of potential, games need "strong localisation", which leads developers to target the US market and hope that success there will lead to worldwide influence and interest.

PG Connects Digital #1 is the best of our Pocket Gamer Connects conference in an online form, with an entire week of talks, meetings, and pitch events taking place from April 6th to the 10th. You can read up on all the tracks taking place through the week here.


Editor

Ric is the Editor of PocketGamer.biz, having started out as a Staff Writer on the site back in 2015. He received an honourable mention in both the MCV and Develop 30 Under 30 lists in 2016 and refuses to let anyone forget about it.