Tencent Dominates Android Game Rankings in China
Published on: Jul 17 2014
Newzoo and TalkingData are happy to announce the launch of a new monthly ranking service which provides insight into the diverse and largely unknown Android games market place in China across multiple android stores. This new ranking is based on the coverage, or total install base, for each mobile game downloaded from any Android store in China. Most popular Android stores include: 360 Mobile Assistant, Myapp, Baidu Mobile Assistant, Google Playstore and more.
To further understand what is happening in the mobile ecosystem, we also provide the activity rank of each game. This is based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) for the titles.
You can find the complete rankings since December 2013 here.
Tencent, currently the world's biggest company by game revenue, tightened their grip on the Android charts in May. They now account for an impressive 12 of the top 20 titles, with 8 of these placed in the top 10. GunZ Dash is without a doubt their shining star, sitting comfortably at the top spot since December 2013. The title boasts double the coverage rate of the next highest game, Speed Up, and 18% of the total installs of the top 20 games. It may have a future rival in PopStar from Zplay however, which has steadily climbed the charts since debuting in April and is now number 1 in the activity rank and number 4 in the coverage rank. PopStar and GunZ Dash are miles ahead when it comes to MAUs, both with an activity rate three times that of Speed Up, and over 30 times that of the number 20 title. The top 5 titles in terms of coverage account for almost half (49%) of the installs of the top 20 games, while the top 2 titles in terms of activity represent 39% of the MAUs.
The data is collected from TalkingData's over 50,000 apps that accessed over 700 million unique mobile devices, their products and also exchanged from the mobile distribution ecosystem and enables them to build the largest behavioral data panel of the mobile population in China. Based on this, they are able to provide the most accurate estimations for the installation, activity and usage of any app in China.
Focusing on the activity rank, we can gather some insight on which games prove best at engaging users. Minion Rush from GameLoft and Clash of Clans (Chinese Version) from Supercell are the only titles that feature in the activity rank top 20 but not in the coverage rank. The Western titles may be finding discovery in the Chinese app eco system difficult, but once installed, prove a hit with Chinese gamers. Though the infamous Flappy Bird title was installed on a huge number of devices, it couldn't entice users to keep playing and is now at number 53 in the activity rank.
More insights on the Chinese market can be found in our recently published China Report: "Introduction to the Chinese Games Market", which provides a high level overview of the country's demographics, economy, media, internet, mobile telecom and app store landscape. Download the report here.
About TalkingData
TalkingData offers the best-in-class Big Data products varying from highly-scalable data mining, deep data analytics, DMP (Data Management Platform), analytical reports, industry benchmarking, and deep-dive market insight reports. Today, 80% of the Top 50 developers in China rely on us to track their app metrics, analyze user data points, and monetization. Our service has reached more than 700 Million unique devices from 50,000 applications.
Newzoo is the leading global market research firm focused purely on the games market. The company provides its clients with a mix of primary consumer research, transactional data and financial analysis across all continents, screens and business models. It is also known for actively sharing a variety of insights by means of free trend reports, infographics, blogposts and monthly rankings. Newzoo's clients include Tencent, SEGA, Logitech, Wizards of the Coast, Nvidia, Microsoft, EA, Coca-Cola and Visa/PlaySpan.