CAPE TOWN - Shanghai’s mobile gaming sector has dominated the gaming industry with a revenue growth of US$18 billion in 2020 and has become one of the big players on the international stage as well.
According to China Global Television Network (CGTN), the global pandemic played a huge part in the surge in mobile games, which contributed to the revenue growth and increased demand.
China’s high-quality locally made mobile devices are also a contributing factor because of their affordability.
“We have been selling games overseas since 2018. Before that, most of our sales were from the domestic market,” said Grace Xiao, branding director at Boke Technology.
“Now, 60% of our customers are overseas players,” she said.
Grace added that after making changes to their games which included improved animation and special effects for the international audience, their daily active users outside China now number more than 20 million.
And, while gaming has seen a massive spike, so too has online streaming both domestically and internationally, which developers are now looking to leverage growth from.
China.org, a state-run publisher, reported that the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game “Honor of Kings” generated 2 billion yuan in a single day on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. The figure is a 50% increase to that of the previous year as game downloads also increased throughout the Spring Festival.
Li Ying, a product manager at an indie company in Hangzhou, said, however, that the surge did not benefit small to medium-sized businesses in the industry.
“Small and medium-sized game companies are struggling to survive, because the investment cannot keep up and daily work has temporarily stalled,” said Li.
“Due to the epidemic, colleagues could not return to work in time, and the project (to release a game during Spring Festival) had to be postponed," he said.
ANA