A man plays a game during his work break. Photo credit: Jens Schott Knudsen.
China, with its approximately 620 million-plus smartphone users, is now the top market for games on Apple’s App Store.
That’s because China has just surpassed the US in terms of iOS gaming revenue, shows new data from App Annie. Japan remains third after being overtaken by China earlier this year.
China’s gaming market generated “nearly double the iOS App Store games revenue it had just a year earlier in Q2 2015,” says the report.
Multiplayer mania
“With the iOS games category taking home about 75 percent of all revenue, China’s leap to the top is attributed to explosive growth for multiplayer collaborative games,” it adds.
Such games have long been popular in China and other parts of Asia on desktop computers, particularly titles like World of Warcraft. Now mobile-only games like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, by the same developer as WoW, are taking off among China’s iPhone and iPad owners. As is Clash Royale.
A scene from Hero Moba, a hugely popular game developed by WeChat parent company Tencent. GIF credit: Tech in Asia/Youku user 极光Oval.
But it’s locally developed games that “dominated China’s top revenue charts and were responsible for a large portion of the year-over-year growth,” in App Annie’s words.
“Specifically, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like Fantasy Westward Journey, Westward Journey Online, and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like Hero Moba were main drivers of China’s growth” in that sector.
That sounds like bad news for foreign publishers.
Apple core
The revenue tally is also boosted by Apple’s surging sales in China ever since the iPhone 6 came out.
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