One of the biggest money-making markets in the home interactive entertainment industry is China's online gaming sector. Unsurprisingly, analytical market group Niko Partners pegs the Chinese online gaming market to surpass the $11.9 billion dollar mark by the end of this year.
As noted in GameIndustry.biz brief write-up on the numerical news, things have really proliferated for the Chinese gaming sector over the past decade, with the informative note stating...
"the Chinese PC online gaming market has grown from $10 million in 2001 to more than $9 billion at 2012's end. And while the firm expects that explosive growth to slow down in the next five years, it still anticipates it will add more than $2 billion to its revenue total in each of the next five years."
This ties into additional data from the Gaming Alliance who released data indicating that the global PC gaming market tallied up to $20 billion by the end of 2012 and that China's online market topped $6.8 billion in the previous year.
If China really does accrue $11.9 billion by the end of 2013 then the regional market is looking at a massive 175% surge in revenue over the previous fiscal year. This could potentially make up for the moderate gains from 2011 to 2012, where revenue for China's online market evened out at $5 billion.
This is huge news for the PC software market, and we're already seeing advertisers try new methods to capitalize on these figures. It's a strange tide especially considering that the PC hardware market doesn't show the same gains as the software sector, and is actually in decline.