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Chinese games sales dropped over 10% in 2022

Chinese games sales dropped over 10% in 2022

The Chinese games market saw its first decline in over two decades in 2022.

That's according to the country's semi-official trade body, the catchily-named Gaming Publishing Committee of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association – as reported by South China Morning Post – the region saw a drop of 10.3 per cent in revenue, falling to 269.5 billion yuan (US$40.1 billion). The number of people playing games dropped 0.33 per cent to 664 million.

This is the first time that game sales have declined on the available data.

As for why this happened, there's a variety of factors. In 2022, there was the government crackdown on China's tech sector, which impacted the country's games industry. Approvals were also frozen for a large part of the year.

Mobile games – which make up over 70 per cent of China's games revenue – dropped 14.4 per cent.

Looking into 2023, China's games industry might see something of a rebound, with restrictions on the country's sector easing somewhat.

That being said, the government still wants a tight hand on what the tech sector's biggest players are doing and is in the process of buying "golden shares", which give the state a say in how they act.


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.