China’s huge population makes it an economic powerhouse, especially at a time when its middle class is expanding rapidly and people have more disposable income to invest in leisure activities and non-essential products.

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Mobile apps certainly fall into this category, with portable gaming exploding thanks to a rise in smartphone ownership and a high number of titles being developed specifically for the Chinese market.

But just how much money are mobile games making in China, and is it really the most valuable app market in the world at the moment?

Impressive Potential

Figures published by TalkingData have shown that while mobile games raked in the equivalent of over £4.8 billion in 2015, this year’s revenues should be even higher, with analyst projections expecting the market value to hit £6.9 billion in 2016.

This upward trajectory is not going to tail off any time soon, as by 2019 the market is expected to generate £9.6 billion annually, if current forecasts are met. However it is not just emerging HTML 5 game developers like http://www.revolvergaming.com that are set to benefit from this boom.

Established Competition

Mobile gaming is a global phenomenon, taking the Western world by storm and quickly finding its foothold in China. Now even companies like Nintendo, which previously chose to offer access to first party software only on hardware it had built itself, are taking notice.

Android remains the dominant OS of choice when it comes to mobile gaming in China, taking hold of 80 per cent of the market compared with the 21 per cent slice that it attributed to Apple’s iOS. There are now more than a billion portable devices capable of running games in China alone, easily making it the world’s biggest marketplace for this type of activity.

The popularity of mobile gaming does mean that there is a lot of competition amongst app developers, with tens of thousands of titles on offer across the various apps stores. This can make gaining recognition and momentum hard for all but the most established brands, although there are exceptions to this rule which rise to prominence through word of mouth. These pioneering companies are less reliant on major advertising campaigns and big marketing budgets being behind them from the very start.