What do Chinese gamers play? 2

This article takes a historical view of what games Chinese people play since the beginning of gaming.

April 9, 2014

3 Min Read

Early 80s

Atari 2600 was the first console ever introduced to China, and it became popular for a short period of time. Then came the Famicom(In US it's called NES, Nintendo Entertainment System).

Late 80s to Early 90s

China was dominated by Famicom during this time, most family bought it just for the Tetris. Most Famicom console and virtually all the Tetris game sold in China were illegal copies. Chinese people had no notion of copy right at that time. And very few gamers ever knew Nintendo.

Late 90s to Early 00s

All though the world had many consoles released, very few of them had legal release in China. China virtually had jumped from Famicom directly to PC time. These were the most popular PC games in China.

This was the time the Chinese game industry had suffered most, for we had lots of those nice games to choose from, and for free.

And a bunch of RPG games after the fashion of Final Fantasy series, but in traditional Chinese Wuxia themes(Kongfu heros) had became successful.

Now

More than 95% of all the gamers are below 30 years old. In China, video games are not for old people(They mostly play mahjong.).

And only very few gamers in China play console games. And virtually all the consoles here are smuggled in from abroad.

From 2005 to 2009, the most popular games are WoW, and dozens of Korean and domestic made games after the fashion of WoW and Diablo.

Today, the most popular are mobile and PC MMO games. Mobile games are mostly locally made, and published by big publishers such as Tencent and NetEase. You can see my another article to see what is hot now.

And most MMO RPG games are locally made or imported from Korea. Local games are mostly in ancient Chinese myth, and Wuxia themes. There’re a few western games in the market, such as League of legends, and Tencent had bought the developer Riot Games lately.