Chinese mobile gaming market sees 250% growth in consumer spend since 2015
App Annie: Total consumer spend in China reaches $11 billion, but remains behind Japan and US
The value of the Chinese mobile gaming market has grown by 250% in two years according to App Annie's 2017 Retrospective.
In a report, the market data firm found that since 2015, mobile gaming in China has grown from $3 billion to $11 billion, making it the third most valuable market in the world.
The region with the highest consumer spend in mobile games was Japan which is valued at $13 billion, having seen a 60% increase on 2015. A close second is the US, which also grew 60%, from $7 billion to just under $11 billion.
It's worth noting that while China is third, the Google Play store is not currently available in the region meaning that only the 34% of consumers with access to the iOS App Store are included in the data.
App Annie also found that the UK has the youngest audience of mobile consumers, with 33% of all users being aged between 13 and 24, while South Korea had the lowest proportion of users in that age bracket with just 13%.
The oldest audience was the US with 37% of users aged over 45, while Japan had the lowest with 26%.
The number of users aged between 25 and 44 ranged from 56% in Japan, to 36% in the UK.
Although a recent report from mobile analytics firm Flurry found that 55% of the market of the mobile market was occupied by larger screened, high-end phones, App Annie found that less than 1% of all game downloads were AR apps.
"Contrary to expectations, we haven't seen an AR boom in Games, even with the introduction of Apple's developer ARKit, as developers continue to work out compelling experiences while keeping ergonomics in mind," noted the report.
"Larger adoption has occurred among non-gaming categories, particularly for entertainment apps. That being said, AR apps still only represent a small portion of total apps in the app stores."
Finally, the report found that Tencent's Honor of Kings reached around 100 million monthly active users, making it by far the most popular gaming app in the world. Coming in at a distant second was Anipop with around 70 million MAUs. Meanwhile, the remaining eight of the top ten most popular gaming apps averaged around 30 million MAUs.