Chinese Video Game Market Shows Steady Growth
According to data from the CGIGC, China’s national video game association, there are 668 million Chinese gamers as of the end of July 2023. That’s about half the population of China! On top of that, Chinese game companies earned 144,263 billion yuan, or about USD $20.23 billion, in sales in the first six months of 2023 alone. These numbers tell us that the Chinese video game market has entered another period of active growth after the Chinese government placed a number of serious restrictions on the game industry.
But there’s a catch: despite the upward trend, sales indicators haven’t reached last year’s levels yet. During the first half of 2022, game publishers earned 150,493 billion yuan on the Chinese market, which is about six billion more than this year.
The Chinese video game industry experienced a crisis in 2022 when the government stopped giving out licenses to publish games and took steps to curtail the industry’s independence. As a result, foreign publishers found themselves in the red, and some of them left the Chinese market entirely. Chinese video game companies suffered from these restrictions as well.
The moratorium on new licenses was called off in late 2022, and now about 90 games a month get the go-ahead from the Chinese government. 88 titles were approved in July, for example. Experts predict that between 1,000 and 1,1000 games will get licenses in 2023. But it’s definitely not the case that every game that gets approved makes it all the way to release – in January of this year, only 23 of 88 licensed games were launched or scheduled for launch.
Although it will take some more time for the market to completely bounce back, the CGIGC’s report shows us that the massive Chinese video game industry is gradually being rebuilt after a difficult period of harsh regulation.
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