China's online game revenues hits $4 billion

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The pace of growth of China's online gaming industry slowed in 2009, growing 30.2 percent to 27.1 billion yuan ($3.97 billion) over the previous year, according to data from research firm iResearch.

The top game operators of 2009 by market share were Tencent Holdings, Shanda Games and NetEase.com the Beijing-based company said.

The number of active online gamers totaled 60 million to 70 million in 2009, about a fifth of China's total Internet population.

China's online gaming revenue, which has seen explosive growth over the past few years, is expected to more than double in the next three years as companies take advantage of increased Internet penetration and rapidly developing sectors such as online social games and online mobile games.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60A0F620100111

Japan only made $3.55 Billions in SW revenue in 2009, which means SW made more money in China Online, than in Japan's Retail.

The most interesting thing is that pretty much all that money made in China is pretty much from PC games!

Not surprising. Depending on which game market analyst you'd believe chinese online gaming revenue growth in following years is estimated to be 25-40% CAGR. At the same time mobile gaming revenue from it's humble ~$300M in 2009 is expected to growth steadily at even faster rate (~50% CAGR). At this point in 3 years China will be single biggest market for online and mobile gaming. Not to mention that PRC government is behaving very protective towards own game industry, so all this revenue is mostly generated thanks to efforts of chinese publishers and developers (and mind you, chinese MMOs are terrible).

I wonder will we ever see somehow significant penetration of console business in China and moreover in the BRIC countries? There're so many talks around about reaching new audiences regardless of age and sex lately, how about reaching new audiences in other countries?

Some of Chinas citizens work as gold farmers in WOW and they need multiple accounts because of the government which has limited the max play time to 4 hours a day. And because Blizzard controls them. And I know that item shops in Diablo 2 also get the items from china.

And I think this is happening for most online games where items or gold has actual value and people pay for this.

And china has 10 times more citizens then japan and since China is just 2 Trillion away from japans economy size it is not too unbelievable.

what is interesting is that both China's and Steam's growths destroy the argument that "PC is dieing", as some ignorants claim.

Guess you are using the old figures, China is expecting to exceed Japan's normal GDP in 2009, and their currency is very under vauled.

I want iQue numbers!