4 surprising facts about China’s mobile gaming market

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Mobile gaming in China is growing – by 2020, it’s projected that mobile could account for half of China’s overall gaming market. But as it’s growing, the market is also changing. A new report from data tracking firms Newzoo and Talking Data reveals a few things about China’s market (as of December 2015) that you might not expect.

1. “Hardcore” games are growing

Mobile doesn’t have to mean casual, and increasingly, China’s gamers are looking for more engrossing alternatives. TalkingData’s data shows that user interest in “heavy content” games – hardcore games that have more complex gameplay and/or content – grew significantly between 2014 and the end of 2015.

2. It’s not the boys’ club you might think

When you think about video game demographics, the first thing that comes to mind is generally: young males. The “young” part is accurate – most of China’s mobile gamers are under 35 – but the male-female split is now almost dead even at 51 percent male to 49 percent female. That split was 55 percent to 45 percent just a few years ago, meaning that the number of female mobile gamers in China continues to grow.

Data from: TalkingData Mobile Data Research Center.

This is especially interesting when you consider the first item on this list, as hardcore games are more typically associated with a larger percentage of male users in other countries. In China, somewhat paradoxically, hardcore games are growing but so is the number of female gamers.

3. Xiaomi and Samsung dominate Android gaming

Given that the report comes from Q4 of 2015, you wouldn’t necessarily expect Xiaomi or Samsung to have performed all that well, considering that both companies had a pretty lackluster year in China last year. But that apparently didn’t extend to gaming, where Xiaomi and Samsung devices completely dominated among Android devices used for mobile gaming. Xiaomi has seven devices among the top 15, and Samsung has five.

Also worth noting: basically nobody games on tablets. 95.7 percent of China’s mobile gaming happened on smartphones.

4. iOS gamers play more, and for longer, but the pay gap is shrinking

Do Apple users have more fun? On their phones, at least, it looks like the answer is yes. TalkingData’s report shows that as of Q4 2015, iOS users in China were playing games more frequently than their Android counterparts, and spending more time – way more time, more than three times as much – playing each game.