296.5 billion yuan! This year, China's game industry revenue decelerated, and user growth slowed down

On December 16, at the 2021 China Game Industry Annual Conference, the Game Working Committee of the China Music and Digital Association released the "2021 China Game Industry Report". The report shows that the actual sales revenue of China's game market in 2021 was 296.513 billion yuan, an increase of 17.826 billion yuan over last year, an increase of 6.40% year-on-year. Although the income still maintained growth, under the influence of the gradual decline in the economic effect of the home economy and the decline in the number of explosive products, the growth rate was reduced by nearly 15% compared with last year.

Game out-of-sea continues to rise

The 2021 China Game Industry Report (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") points out that the number of domestic game users is gradually saturating. In 2021, the scale of Chinese game users reached 666 million, an increase of 0.22% year-on-year. However, with the landing of new anti-addiction regulations and the gradual deepening of uninsured work, the user structure will further become healthy and reasonable.

Self-developed games are the largest contributors to the sales revenue of the domestic game market. In 2021, the sales revenue of the domestic market of self-developed games was 255.819 billion yuan, an increase of 15.627 billion yuan over last year, an increase of 6.51% year-on-year. The sales revenue of self-developed games in overseas markets was 18.013 billion US dollars, an increase of 16.59% year-on-year.

It is worth mentioning that China's game going to sea has shown a steady upward trend, and the number of user downloads, the length of use and the amount of payment have maintained a steady growth. In 2021, the number of countries and regions involved in China's game industry going to sea will increase significantly, and the types of products will be more diversified. The United States, Japan and South Korea are still the main markets for games to go global, but from the data of the past three years, their total proportion has shown a downward trend year by year, and the proportion of other regions has increased year by year, indicating that China's self-developed games are constantly expanding emerging markets.

The number of new mobile game products online has decreased

Mobile games still occupy the mainstream of the domestic game market, accounting for 76.06% of the total revenue. Client games accounted for 19.83%, basically stable; web games are still shrinking, accounting for only 2.03%, and sales revenue and market share continue to decline.

In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's mobile game market was 225.538 billion yuan, an increase of 15.862 billion yuan over last year, an increase of 7.57% year-on-year. Due to the significant reduction in the number of new mobile game launches this year, the source of income mainly relies on the support of the original products.

Among them, in the top 100 mobile game product IP types accounted for the proportion, the largest proportion is self-created IP, accounting for 41%, and another 24%, 9% and 8% of mobile games are adapted from client games, novels and console/stand-alone games, respectively, and CROSS-border linkage with IP in other fields is still one of the important characteristics of the development of the game industry in 2021.

The sales revenue of the domestic client game market was 58.8 billion yuan, an increase of 2.88 billion yuan over last year, an increase of 5.15% year-on-year, which was the first positive growth in three years, mainly due to the outstanding performance of newly listed client products this year, and the gradual rise of the full-platform distribution model with mobile games as the core, and the return of user habits.

At the same time, the actual sales revenue of the domestic web game market has further declined. In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's web game market was only 6.030 billion yuan, which was 1.578 billion yuan less than in 2020, down 20.74% year-on-year, and continued to show a downward trend for five consecutive years. The main reason is that the number of web games has continued to decrease; although the head game companies are also actively developing web games, the overall market space continues to shrink under the squeeze of the client game and mobile game markets.

In addition, the domestic console game market has also ushered in a large increase. In 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's console game market reached 2.580 billion yuan, an increase of 22.34% year-on-year. In 2021, new host hardware was released, and domestic independent research and development products successively landed on the host platform, which promoted the revenue growth of the host market.

Written by: Nandu reporter Chen Peijun