The Chinese gaming market continues to grow hand over fist. There's a massive amount of gamers flocking to the market and a massive amount of yuan flowing into the pockets of anxiously opportunistic publishers. How much money is flowing into their pockets? Try $13 billion on for size.
Rivaling the likes of the North American or EMEA video game markets, China's emerging industry of interactive entertainment is growing exponentially every year on end.
GamesIndustry.biz has a brief report from a Games In Asia translation that helps identify and expound the financial propensity of the Chinese gaming market.
The overall industry brought the region a massive 87 billion yuan for fiscal 2013, which rounds out to $13 billion in U.S., dollars. It's also up 38 percent in year-over-year revenue.
The data shows that $8.87 billion, or 64 percent of the total sales, were from client-based PC games. However, the data doesn't denote if that means client-based MMOs or client-based standalone games. I'm going to assume they clumped both categories of games in together.
$2.11 billion was racked in from browser-based games, making up for barely 15 percent of the intake.
On the lower-end of the spectrum was the mobile games sector, accounting for only 13.5 percent of the market share with $1.86 billion. This bit of information might be surprising to all those pro-mobile analysts, as they've been egging Nintendo about dying to smartphones and tablets and constantly claiming that portable phone devices are the wave of the future for video games, but this data ties into two-year old data that shows that mobile gaming is not gaining nor overtaking the core games sector.
The bottom of the list, as far as revenue intake is concerned, is the social and console games market. In China, both categories of games only managed $890 million. A lot of that is due to the stringent restrictions on console devices being sold in mainland China, although there are some diplomatic import levies being looked at to allow for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to share a much stronger presence in the consumer market in mainland China.
It's interesting because the GI.biz article notes that there was a 43 percent increase in the financial growth rate of the market in China from 2009, where the intake was only $4.3 billion, but China generated $6 billion in 2011 and a massive $9.1 billion in 2012.
Funnily enough, analysts like the Niko Group capped the Chinese game market at $11.9 billion in their estimates, but today we see that they actually surpassed that estimate by $1.1 billion. Very impressive.
