By Josh Ye
HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s video game player has grown to a record of 668 million, a government-run game industry association said on Thursday, as the world’s biggest gaming market returns to growth after a bruising crackdown.
The association, the CGIGC, made the announcement of the record 668 million gaming population, as of the end of June, at an industry conference in Shanghai, adding that the sales revenue of the domestic gaming market reached 144.263 billion yuan ($20.23 billion) for the first half of this year.
“Against the backdrop of a sluggish global gaming market, China’s gaming industry is gradually emerging from a trough and showing an upward trend,” Zhang Yijun, a director at the CGIGC, told the conference.
“Facing the challenges of the second half of the year, we still need to boost industry confidence.”
China’s gamer population shrank for the first time last year amid a sweeping, months-long government crackdown on the industry over gaming addiction concerns.
The crackdown wiped out significant revenue and market value for many domestic gaming giants including Tencent Holdings and NetEase.
However, gaming revenue has yet to return to a pre-crackdown level. Sales revenue fell from 150.493 billion yuan in the first half of 2021 to 144.263 billion this first half.
Authorities stopped approving new games for nearly eight months between 2021 and 2022 as part of the crackdown, but have since loosen regulations.
Regulators approved the latest batch of game licenses on Wednesday, allowing 88 games to hit the market for the month of July.
“We remain confident about a steady domestic game approval process heading into (the second half of this year), with 80-90 games approved each month, totaling 1,000-1,100 domestic games approved in 2023, approximately double the 512 games approved in 2022,” Alicia Yap, an analyst at Citi Bank, wrote in a note on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Josh Ye in Hong Kong; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Robert Birsel)
