China beats US as biggest video game market

Newzoo, a video game market research company, recently released their annual “Top 100 Countries by Game Revenues” list, which showed China finally topping the United States. Last year, the USA held a $2.6 billion dollar lead, but the Chinese video game industry surged by over $4.3 billions dollars this year. They made over $22.22 billion dollars in 2015, while the US made $21.96 billion. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s enough.

This outcome is not completely unexpected, as the Chinese Internet population is almost as large as the other top 10 countries on the list combined – it consists of just over 740 million people, as opposed to the United States’s 290 million people. Looking at the per capita amount spent on video games from both of their respective Internet populations, the US far outstrips China. The average Chinese gamer spends $30.02 dollars video games every year, while the average American spends $75.60. The third largest revenue market, Japan, spent $12.32 billion dollars on video games, and their per capita was even higher than the United States’, at over $106.3 per person. 

As more of China’s population gets access to the Internet and technology every year, the gap in video game revenue will probably continue to increase, especially considering that the ban on consoles in the country was recently lifted.