China's Online Game Market Raked in $5.1 Billion in the First Half of This Year

ChinaJoy, China’s biggest gaming conference, kicked off yesterday in Shanghai, and at the opening some pretty interesting data on China’s games market was revealed. According to data collated by the Games Working Committee, IDC, and Gamma Data, China’s online games took in a stunning 31.3 billion RMB ($5.1 billion) in revenue over the first half of 2013. The games industry as a whole brought in $5.5 billion, so it’s not hard to see just how big online gaming is in China. Chinese-developed games accounted for a significant majority that sum.

Most ($3.8 billion) of that income came from PC-based online games, but mobile online games also had a strong showing, bringing in over $400 million and achieving 119 percent growth compared to the same period last year. And, as you might expect, only a small percentage of it came from console games, which brought in around $100 million over the six-month period. (Game consoles are technically banned in China, but widely available on the gray market anyway. Rumor has it the ban could be lifted soon, but numbers like these are exactly why we’re not too sanguine about how much that would even matter).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, although Chinese-developed games dominated the market in China, their performance in the rest of the world was pretty terrible, bringing in just $480 million from overseas in 1H 2013.

(via Sina Tech)