Stereotypically, gamers from China enjoyed free-to-play MMO titles but that certainly isn't true today.
That's according to the panellists we gathered to discuss the Chinese market and the opportunity therein at the end of The PC Revolution track.
"In the past, there was an idea of China only playing free-to-play MMOs on PC, and that stems from back when Chinese consumers didn't have so much spending power," Jagex head of business development Cassia Curran said.
"There was a lot of piracy so the only way for developers to generate better revenues in China was to have always-online games which were impossible to pirate. Free-to-play was originally in China. But you're seeing, now, all different types of genres and premium games, doing well in China. The market is really becoming more mature."
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad added: "In terms on billion-dollar games, MMOs are the mainstays that you certainly see. Over the past few years, you've seen new genres come to the market like battle royale. PUBG, for example, sold 15m copies in China alone, which is a huge feat considering it's a paid game. Overwatch is another game that's popular. NetEase distributed it as a premium $30 game in China and it's sold through about six million units. Yes, people play MMOs and MOBAs and those games get to the top of the charts and they're always there, but there really is a wide range of games and genres that are and can be popular. It's a $15bn market - there's plenty of room to find consumers who are interested in your game."
Jim Ying, managing director of investment bank CVCapital's Digital Entertainment's business sees this as being partly down to Steam coming to the region.
"With the entry of Steam and as consumer taste evolved, they had access to some of the paid games that came through Steam," he said.
"Many of these are high-quality games, so naturally the Chinese audience is going to enjoy them. As copyright control has evolved in China, so people are more willing to pay for titles, they're willing to pay for some of these paid games, as well."
The greater willingness to spend money on premium games is, in part, a sign of status.
"Consumer tastes are changing, they're probably more mature, they have more income to spend. Previously they were resorting to piracy as they didn't have money, in some cases," Curran explained.
"Now there's a greater ability and willingness to spend. There is more interest in quality. A lot of the premium games, especially from the West, are notably high quality. Chinese gamers tend to be quite obsessed with status. Being really into high-quality premium games is almost like a sign of status - that they can afford these games."
Not only that, disposable income has increased, too. Ahmad says that the Chinese audience has always enjoyed premium games; it just didn't want to pay for them.
"Back in 2002 and 2003, 50 per cent of Chinese gamers did play premium titles," he said.
"But it was all piracy and there was no publishing scene. What changed is that disposable income has increased. The quality of games is much higher as well. The types of games available now are much harder to pirate, so if you want to play Overwatch, for example, you need to be online. You can't really play that by pirating it. The reason that a platform like Steam has become so big is that it has local support from Perfect World, so Dota 2 came to China. That had a lot of people getting a Steam account. Initially, that was all they were using it for that. When all these hardcore games came to the platform, people wanted to try them out. Now there are more games localised with Simplified Chinese, about 2,000 on Steam, there's local payment offered, there's regional pricing. There's also been a cultural shift where people do want to have that official version of the game. It's true of the broader entertainment industry - people want to pay for films and TV shows as opposed to pirating them."