In 2015 Q4, the overall size of China’s client online game market reached RMB 14.617 billion, a jump of 0.1% quarter on quarter and 0.3% year on year, shown in the Quarterly Monitoring Report on China’s Client Online Game Market 2015 Q4 published by Analysys. Details are shown in the figure below: China’s client online game market has proceeded to the stock market, in which the overall industry is supported by a few major vendors and big-budget games with relatively stable player groups, and based on the attraction for new young players and return of original players by launching new versions of original games. Benefit from the advantages of policy and capital, China’s electronic sports industry has shown a momentum of rapid resuscitation, with increasing electronic sports events and relevant live broadcasts, which make contributions to the improvement of player viscosity and day-to-day revenue of electronic sports online games such as League of Legends (LOL) and DOTA. However, in the opinion of Analysys from the perspective of overall environment and development cycle of the game industry, with the continuous decline of PC shipments for years and the increasingly growing penetration rate of mobile netizens, the client game market has shown a descending trend, and it is predicted that the size of China’s client game market will be caught up by that of mobile game market in 2016. In the market competition pattern, Tencent still occupied 54.4% of the total market shares relying on its several competitive mainstream products. In December, 2015, Tencent announced that it purchased the rest stock rights of Riot, the developer of LOL, and thus wholly owned the stock rights of Riot, and became the owner of the most money-drawing client online game. In 2015 Q4, the powerful IP Monster Hunter OL was launched; the new version of Blade & Soul was put into operation; games such as LOL, DNF and Moonlight Blade maintained a high-DAU and high-flow status for a long term, showing a swift and violent money-drawing momentum. At present, Tencent Games has gained the right of agency in Maple Story 2 which is a follow-up online game of Maple Story produced by NEXON, but the test time has not be released yet. Hunger marketing has always been the main promotion strategy of Tencent in the client game market. It has shown significant effects in the past, and will be continued to use in the future.
Though the revenue of NetEase’s PC client games has declined slightly in three successive quarters, it still occupied 17.5% of the total shares of China’s client game market in 2015 Q4. The growth in users of World of Warcraft has declined in years of operation, but its strong user base is still bringing stable revenue to NetEase, and it is expected that the revenue will increase steadily in the future considering the client and online Hearthstone and the newly-launched Revelation.
In 2015, with the strategic transformation of client game enterprises to the mobile game field, Tencent and NetEase basically established their monopoly status in the mobile game market with strong capital, R&D and channel advantages, and other major client game vendors such as Perfect World and GIANT also turned to the mobile game market, and were engaged in the development and operation of mobile games. In 2015, Tencent and NetEase jointly occupied over 50% of shares in China’s mobile game market. After the client game market proceeded to a recession period, the client game vendors are outputting their values to emerging fields such as mobile games and H5 games, as well as excessive entertainment fields such as film and television in a manner of IP adaptation.
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