China's online games market is expected to exceed US$9.2 billion by 2014 from US$6.6 billion last year, with microclient version of games emerging as a trend and the number of casual gamers growing across the region, research firms say.
In a study released Wednesday, Pearl Research noted that the growth in online games, inclusive of MMORPG, casual, social and web games, grew 32 percent last year.
It pointed to the strong revenue by Chinese game operators, where the top 5 companies made a combined US$5.3 billion in revenues. The list was led by Tencent (US$2.5 billion), Netease (US$1 billion), Shanda Games (US$838 million), Changyou (US$485 million) and Perfect World (US$474 million).
Pearl Research noted that an emerging trend was the popularity of micro-client version of games. "Micro-client files are generally smaller, less than 50MB compared to more than 1GB for a typical client-based game. This significantly cuts down on a user's download time of the game to under 15 minutes with a broadband connection. The small size of micro-client software is convenient and appealing to users, especially those users on game portals and social networking platforms," it noted in the report.
The research firm also pointed out that a key growth market for China would be Web games, which were accessible and user friendly. That market is expected to hit over US$1 billion in 2013 from US$800 million last year.
In a separate research note released Thursday, Ovum forecast that the wider digital gaming market for Asia-Pacific would more than double over the next four years to be worth US$30.3 billion in 2016--a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 per cent. It noted that this growth rate was a healthy 2 per cent ahead of the global average, and retail sales in the region comprised over half of global retails sales in 2011.
Neha Dharia, Ovum's consumer telecoms analyst, said that Asia-Pacific was already vital in terms of digital gaming retail sales, and will grow in importance in future.
She commented: "The region will drive the digital games market globally. The most significant retail sales contribution will come from the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) sector, while the highest amount of growth in the Asia-Pacific market will come from mobile gaming."
Dharia added that with more and more casual players entering the market, gamer numbers will grow faster than retail sales, resulting in the erosion of average revenue per user (ARPU). Casual and social games will be vital to growing the number of gamers and bringing digital games into the mainstream.
"There is a considerable split between Asia-Pacific's developed and emerging regions. This results in a higher level of ARPU in South-Korea and Japan than in China, for example, which has lower ARPU due to a large gamer base and the relatively low cost of games," said Dharia.
Ovum's forecast for the Asia-Pacific market predicted that online unique gamers will number over 1 billion in 2016, while there will be slightly fewer than 900m mobile gamers in 2016.
Dharia concluded: "The growth of digital gaming in Asia-Pacific will give service providers an opportunity to grow their revenues in the region. Telcos in particular could harness this growth by offering gaming-specific connections, or bundling mobile games with data access packs. In addition, shifting the distribution of payments offline could encourage the number of in-app game purchases."
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