China’s online gaming market reached 35.39 billion (US$5.51 billion) in the third quarter of 2015 with an increase of 5.5% QoQ and 24.5% YoY according to iResearch.
Mobile gaming accounted for 35.1% China online gaming market while online gaming declined in terms of transactions.
Mobile gaming has become the driving force of China online gaming market. As users spent more and more time on smartphones and mobile games, the mobile gaming market was expected to exceed PC client online gaming.
The mobile gaming market in Q3 2015 was predicted to reach 12.41 billion (US$1.89 billion) with an increase of 11.9% QoQ and 72.0% YoY although Analysys, another Chinese research company, predicted it would reach 14.66 billion yuan (US$2.28 billion) in Q3 2015.
The increase was mainly due to more severe competitive game categories as FPS and MOBA and increasing IP games which have brought more traffic and fans. What’s more, a large number of students are obsessed with mobile gaming during summer holidays in August and September.
The most popular mobile games were role play games, cards games and chess games in the third quarter of 2015. China’s mobile gaming players are expected to reach 360 million generating transactions of US$50.1 billion according to RecordJapan, and the average weekly usage will be as long as 4.3 hours in 2015.
The overall online gaming market in China this year is expected to reach $22.2 billion (about 142 billion yuan), and officially surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest online gaming market according to data of TalkingData and Newzoo.
Also read: China’s Mobile Internet Insights Q1-Q3 2015