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26.34 million

January 12th, 2006 (Visited 4645 times) Tags:

Players in China, that is. And the stats are:

Paying 30 to 50 yuan (about 3.7 to 6.2 U.S. dollars)
1/3 of them ages 19 to 22
28.4% between 23 and 25
38.9% highschool and college-aged
3.4% minors under the age of 16

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Ramblings of a little Blue Gnoll wrote on February 6th, 2006 at 7:00 am:

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Reader Comments

Q said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:04 am:
I think the big story here is that nobody over 25 is playing these games in China. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that they’re killing everyone over the age of 25 and replacing them with robots. Maybe they’re just Stepfording them and they’re all still happy, they just don’t play games anymore. Then the irony would be that all the games they play up til 25 are really case studies for the programmers to improve the Stepford process on them later!! OLD CHINESE… IS PEOPLE!!
Grimwell said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:13 am:
The numbers don’t add up? Or perhaps they do, but they seem a bit odd.

38.9% are highschool and college aged.
Take out the 33% that are 19 – 22 (college aged) and you have 5.9% left.

Take out the 3.4% that are under the age of 16 (which includes high school aged children) and you have 2.5% left that are aged 17 – 18. Actually you should have more since a portion of that 3.4% is not going to dig into this statistic, but being that people 19 – 22% play at a rate of 33% involvement, it’s hard for me to grasp 17 – 18 year olds playing in single digit involvement rates.

Seems that it would hover nearer, to the 33% rate, unless they really do wait to finish being high school aged before trying the games.
Darniaq said on January 13th, 2006 at 6:27 am:
Hehe Grimmy, you and your calculators I think college over there starts at 16 or 17, or, one year earlier than it does in the U.S.

All in all, I take this as further proof that all markets are different. For example, the number of people playing online games (not including MMORPGs) in the U.S. almost double those listed as playing in China, and are predominantly women in an age bracket a full 10 years senior to the predominant player in China. What they’re playing is very different too.

This could be because while China has a lot of people, the economic strata in their society are set up a bit differently, slowing the proliferation of online gaming through many factors, including general acceptance by society. Some MMOGs have done pretty well over there (I think it’s Mu that’s still on top), but their growth I think will be similar to what it is in the U.S.: through the casual online gaming scene, what some call diversional gaming (rather than immersive).

And even within MMOGs, the fact that China’s WoW population is not six times that of the U.S. (it’s more like about 50% more last reported) could indicate either the game doesn’t resonate as well as Eastern-themed titles, or there’s simply not that many people within their population that is more than six times our population interesting in playing games to that level of immersion.

There’s a big difference between Bejeweled 2 from a huge library of short-play games and a single immersive title.

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