Overtaking the US, China is now the “gamer capital of the world”

On 1 June, the London-based venture capital firm Atomico published a report on the revenue made in the computer gaming industry, with some pretty shocking results.

First of all, the results show that the global revenue from computer games has surpassed $100 billion globally for the first time ever, namely last year in 2016. In 2015, the total revenue was $91.8 billion. This suggests that the computer game industry is showing no signs of slowing down, with predictions that this amount will increase even further by as much as 7.8% this year.

Another interesting point made in the report is that China’s gaming market on the whole remains within China – around 93% of the money spent on games in China is spent on titles produced and developed in China. This is a huge difference to US gamers, who spend around 56% of their money on games developed in the US, and European gamers, who spend just 36% of their total money games that are developed in Europe.

China’s generated revenue and its cause

In total, China has around 600 million gamers. And of the $101.1 billion global market value over the year 2016, these 600 million gamers generated $24.6 billion – around 25% of the total revenue. Close behind, but low enough to allow China to overtake, the US gamers generated around $24.1 billion of the total revenue.

One notable cause of China surpassing the US and taking the role of “gamer capital of the world” is Apple’s mobile app store in China. In fact, 31% of the total revenue generated by games on iOS was generated by Chinese gamers. When you look back at the report from 2012, when China only generated 3% of the total revenue earned by iOS, you can see that there is certainly an increase taking place here in the app store market.

What else did the report show?

The fact that China has technically become the gamer capital of the world isn’t the only thing that the report showed. Tom Wehmeier, the author of the report that was published on 1 June, stated that “We’ve got to the point today where there are now more than two billion gamers globally, and mobile has really taken over to the extent that it’s the largest segment overall”.

In fact, not surprisingly, Atomico have predicted that mobile games will make up 42% of the global games industry revenue in 2017, with predictions that, by 2020, the revenue made by mobile games will overtake the total value of all other traditional platforms for games – PC and console – and generate 51% of the total revenue.

So it is exciting times ahead in terms of the revenue of the gaming industry. Will mobile games truly start to take over in the near future?