China’s mobile gaming revenue approached 56.2 billion Yuan in 2015 at an over 100% growth rate. The impressive growth was mainly attributed to the launch of mobile version of popular client-based IP games like Fantasy Westward Journey as traditional client game companies, represented by NetEase, broke into the mobile gaming market. In addition, long commuting time and fast pace of life increase players’ demands for on-the-go games.
Among all the mobile gaming publishing channels in China, mobile gaming revenue in Android channels was twice of that in iOS channel in 2015, of which hardware companies and operators captured increasing share. Compared with third-party app stores like Baidu mobile assistant and Myapp, mobile phone companies have a significant advantage, that is, they can pre-install app store on their phones and their shipments become the sources of the user base, which greatly reduces marketing cost. Similarly, operators can transfer offline traffic to online traffic by promoting contract phones and custom phones.
Share of mobile games with IP in all the mobile games by exposures was bigger than the share by number in 2015. 13% of mobile games with IP brought 32% of the exposures of mobile games. In general, IP played an important role in attracting players. However, IP had little impact on increasing of players of the leading mobile games in 2015. Some mobile games invested too much in operation of IP and ignored the point that mobile games won the favor of the players by high quality instead of IP.
