To help developers better understand the development status of the game industry, Gamma Data and TapTap jointly released the ‘2024 TapTap Mobile Game Industry White Paper’. This white paper not only contains the latest market conditions of China’s game industry, but also has hundreds of enterprise survey data and thousands of player survey data, thereby helping developers better understand the overall development of the game industry.
At the same time, this report gathers many core data exposed by TapTap for the first time, allowing more developers to deeply understand the current situation of the mobile game industry through data, and use data conclusions to help themselves, providing more ideas to solve pain points for high-quality products, and forming a healthy ecosystem where developers and players achieve mutual success on TapTap. The report research shows that in 2024, the scale of China’s game market reached a new high, reaching 325.783 billion yuan. The monthly average consumption of advertising creative materials exceeded 25 million. The average enterprise sales expense ratio rose to 23.8%, and the customer acquisition cost is still rising. More than 75% of users prefer to download official packages. TapTap is the third-highest download channel after the game official website and the Apple App Store. In the first half of 2024, the monthly average active users of TapTap reached 43.24 million, and the annual download volume is expected to exceed 800 million times. The discussion degree of ‘paying’ reached a peak of 27.64% in 2023 and improved in 2024 but is still at a relatively high level. In terms of game unlocking modes, ‘advertising unlocking’ has a popularity of 80.9%, and players are more inclined to unlock game content at low cost. 177 independent games are among the TOP 500 in download volume, accounting for 24.65% of the download volume. This article only uses part of the data from the ‘2024 TapTap Mobile Game Industry White Paper’. For the full version of the report, scan the QR code to download directly or click ‘Read More’ at the end of the article to download. The overall development status of China’s game industry. In 2024, the growth rate of the game industry exceeded 7%. Two consecutive years of rebounds have made the actual sales revenue of China’s game market reach a new high. The scale of game players has also ushered in continuous growth. The growth rate reached 0.94%, which is the highest in nearly three years. More than 6.27 million new players have joined the game circle. In 2024, the growth rate of mobile games reached 5.01%. In the past ten years, mobile games have continuously promoted the industry to increase by more than 200 billion. Now the growth momentum has reached its peak. The market share of mobile games reached its peak in 2021 and has not been exceeded for three consecutive years. In the future, the game market will rely on growth in multiple fields, such as client-side, console, and stand-alone games to jointly promote the continuous rise of the market. In 2024, the growth rate of mobile game users rebounded, and the number of new users exceeded five million, which is on par with the overall user growth.In 2024, the revenue of client-side game market shows limited growth but maintains a good momentum, with a stable proportion of around 20%. At the user level, the demand for high-quality client-side games still exists and core users are stable. Multi-terminal interoperability helps mobile games expand into the client-side field, improving quality and broadening the audience, and is expected to supplement new resources for client-side games.
In 2024, the scale of China’s console game market increased by 50% year-on-year. It is mainly driven by blockbuster products, especially ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ has a greater driving effect. The domestic market scale still has room for further growth, and there is room for improvement in aspects such as equipment retention rate and developer ecosystem. At the user level, the increase is relatively small, about 14%, and the increment exceeds one million. This is mainly because console equipment has a high threshold and strong dependence, but it is weak in terms of price and portability. Some potential users only stay at the stage of watching live broadcasts and do not own console equipment. In terms of the marketing development status of China’s game industry, the average monthly consumption of advertising creative materials exceeds 25 million. Listed game enterprises are under marketing pressure. In recent years, the marketing battlefield of China’s game industry is mainly in the field of mobile games, with 90% of investment in mobile games. And the overall mobile game advertising is also facing the situation of increasing difficulty in acquiring customers. The iteration speed of advertising creativity is getting faster and faster. When the effect is not good, advertisers will quickly change advertising materials. AI helps further increase the speed of creative production. In addition to the increase in the number of advertising creative materials, the marketing expenses of game enterprises are also continuously rising. According to Gamma data, the average sales expense ratio of listed game enterprises in China has risen to 23. 8%, and the customer acquisition cost is still climbing. Although many manufacturers have tried new methods, the situation of ‘involution’ in bidding advertisements still exists, and high marketing expenses further compress the profit space of enterprises. More than 60% of small and medium-sized games value game forum/community marketing. Compared with large game enterprises’ high investment in marketing, small and medium-sized developers rely more on game forum/community marketing and need refined operation to obtain core users and then build word-of-mouth and complete user acquisition. This method first requires the product gameplay to be distinctive and find a suitable forum/community for user operation. Diversified enterprise breakthrough strategies: R & D and marketing move forward in coordination. In order to break through, game enterprises have carried out diversified explorations in marketing. First, they use high-quality game content to attract natural traffic, and coordinate R & D and content marketing. At the same time, they explore secondary gameplay of products, polish content and verify each other with the effect of buying volume. In addition, long-term operation needs to continuously produce high-value content and combine with customer acquisition. At present, the synergistic effect of game marketing and R & D has become increasingly significant. Game channels are important marketing carriers for enterprises. Channel selection determines product customer acquisition ideas. When game enterprises formulate marketing strategies, channel selection is extremely important.Enterprises primarily focus on the user base and quality of distribution channels, hence allocating more marketing budgets to large-scale gaming channels that can filter target users. 51.6% of companies value revenue sharing ratios, and under the circumstances of declining game profits, high revenue sharing becomes a burden, leading companies to prefer low-sharing channels to complement their marketing efforts. TapTap, as a zero-revenue-sharing channel, can effectively enhance developers’ profit margins. Therefore, platforms and channels need to possess composite capabilities to meet the marketing and derivative needs of gaming companies. Over 70% of users have a clear preference for official packages, which drive net profit growth and become the core driver of corporate purchasing. 75% of users prefer to download official packages, which is key to game marketing. Official downloads allow gaming companies to avoid channel sharing and increase net profit margins, thereby encouraging companies to increase their purchasing efforts and guide users to download official packages. Official packages are popular due to reasons such as no bundled software, no ads, rich activity information, fast updates, and the provision of more special resources and benefits. More than 30% of users realize that official packages can bring more revenue to developers, indicating that users are also aware of the impact of channel sharing on developers. Large-scale customer acquisition platform marketing is a mainstream brand investment with continuous layout. In addition to game product characteristics, factors such as recommended advertisements, game live streaming, and influencer recommendations also dominate player downloads. Diversified methods of showcasing games, social media marketing, player recommendations, and leaderboard recommendations are also strengthening brand advertising construction. Vertical user platforms have become an important marketing battlefield for companies. Most gaming marketing strategies focus on launch activities, with about 40% of users paying attention to games during this period. This phase is characterized by product maturity and commercialization, with generally higher investment. Some games accumulate users through marketing before launch and rely on core users to quickly spread the game’s popularity upon release. However, user acquisition during testing and pre-registration periods is challenging, often focusing on vertical gaming platforms and communities, requiring highly interested user participation. Approximately 90% of users will seek information before playing games, making vertical user platforms an important information release battleground, especially significant during testing and pre-registration periods. Download habits, game content richness, and other factors drive users to choose TapTap. TapTap’s value in game customer acquisition is significant and well-received by players for various reasons. Firstly, as a vertical platform, it has the advantage of rich content. Secondly, as an official channel, it also has advantages in information and benefits, aligning with users’ preferences for official packages. Additionally, the evaluation mechanism, communication atmosphere, and community environment are also major factors in users’ choice of TapTap. TapTap meets developers’ deep expectations for channels, occupying advantageous positions in multiple elements. TapTap can not only meet user needs but also provide developers with comprehensive services, such as basic services, testing, updates, etc., allowing developers to regard it as an official website and community.
TapTap can meet the needs of developers in multiple dimensions. It has a large user base with high quality, no revenue sharing fees, and provides data testing support and service systems.
From the user’s perspective, the overall user scale of TapTap continues to grow. In the first half of 2024, the average monthly active users reached 43.24 million. At this stage, TapTap is continuously acquiring and maintaining the core user group of games. High login rates of top products and enhancing the richness of the product matrix. Among the top 500 mobile games in terms of revenue in 2024, over 90% are logged in on TapTap. As a key channel for enterprise operation, it shows that TapTap can represent and reflect the overall situation of the mobile game industry to a certain extent. Simulation games have the highest proportion and many new games. Some vertical gameplay also has top products. In the past three years, role-playing, strategy, and simulation games have seen the most new additions. As a vertical community, TapTap can help developers clearly understand user needs and accurately search for user groups. Role-playing, strategy, card, and idle games have remarkable new download data. In the past three years, the proportion of new downloads of shooting and competitive games is less than 10%. Due to the relatively mature market of this category, large DAU works occupy players’ time, and new products are difficult to attract players. However, the well-prepared ‘Delta Operation’ successfully broke through in 2024. In contrast, role-playing, simulation, and strategy categories perform well in terms of new downloads and are the categories that have continued to grow on TapTap in the past three years. The secondary element theme occupies an absolute dominant position. New Chinese element themes such as national style, cultivation, and martial arts have highlights. The secondary element category occupies the top in game distribution, and there are also many new products. In addition, cultivation and national style element themes have also grown significantly under the influence of policy support and low-cost transformation. Rich cultural themes represent developers’ exploration of the needs of vertical users and attract and consolidate users through refined gameplay. Enterprises continuously pay attention to player word-of-mouth. Timely response and solving user problems become the key. 90% of users will understand relevant information before playing games. Product ratings and evaluations greatly affect users’ first impressions. Therefore, player word-of-mouth is the focus of enterprises at this stage. The positive evaluation of game products on TapTap in 2024 accounts for 61%, and the negative accounts for 29%. Compared with 2023, the positive evaluation has slightly decreased, and the overall evaluation has declined, reflecting the rising user needs. The discussion degree of ‘pay-to-win’ reached a peak of 27.64% in 2023 and is still relatively high in 2024. The occurrence frequency of ‘time-consuming’ continues to be above 5%. In addition, the frequency of ‘boring’ is rapidly increasing. Players are easily tired of repetitive content, and developers need to increase the freshness of content.Plot and character attention is high and continuously increasing. Visuals, music, and modeling details are indispensable elements. From the TapTap user’s focus on game content, the term ‘plot’ appears most frequently, reflecting players’ increased demand for gaming experience. Nearly 80% of top-tier games have initiated game welfare and gift package welfare operations, rapidly increasing the distribution of benefits, which are both a focus for players and an important way to enhance the operational effectiveness of game products.
In 2024, nearly 80% of top-tier TapTap products have launched welfare operations on the TapTap platform, with a total exceeding 3000 games. The TapTap channel’s no-commission policy offers a larger profit space, which can be used for user operations to enhance stickiness and attract new users.Operation and fairness are key points of player attention. Player feedback is directly related to game retention rates. Player satisfaction is influenced by many factors, among which fairness, operability, and payment are the most important, with about half of the players considering them as significant factors affecting the gaming experience. The impact of game mechanics, social interaction, and visual performance is relatively equal. Nearly 50% of players will uninstall games when dissatisfied, directly affecting game revenue and continuous development. Developers need to pay attention to player feedback, optimize the experience in a timely manner, and enhance game quality.
Value perception is the primary driver for payment. The game monetization model requires developers to think deeply. Players’ willingness to pay is mainly influenced by the perceived value of in-game items, and they are willing to pay to enhance the experience. Developers need to consider various factors to increase the willingness to pay and satisfaction. The ‘advertising unlock’ model has a popularity of 80.9%, far exceeding the ‘payment unlock’ of 32.21%, reflecting players’ preference for low-cost unlocking of game content and a cautious attitude towards in-game purchases.
The current state of survival for independent games: 177 independent games have download volumes in the TOP500, providing more survival space for independent developers. Independent game teams are small and have weak commercialization capabilities, making them unsuitable for volume marketing, and they have limited survival space on conventional platforms. However, TapTap is a fertile ground for independent game developers. TapTap continues to focus on independent games, with 35.4% of the download volume in the TOP500 being independent games, accounting for 24.65% of the total downloads, indicating that independent games have a good survival space on TapTap. Influenced by platform recommendations, resource support, and user searches, independent games are popular among core users.
The average number of reservations for products is steadily increasing, showing that user enthusiasm for independent games remains high. Since 2019, the average number of reservations for top-tier independent games on TapTap has exceeded 100,000, and in 2020, the reservation volume for ‘Human: Fall Flat’ exceeded 6 million, driving the average reservation volume for the year to increase. The continuous rise in reservations for independent games indicates the sustained enthusiasm of users for independent games.
User numbers and sales are maintained at the million-level, with a high proportion of ‘free for a limited time’ users. In 2024, TapTap sold over 4 million buy-to-play games, with paying users exceeding 3 million, and a total of over 25 million copies sold over five years. However, the number of users who obtained the game for free during limited-time promotions also reached the million-level, making it important to continue to explore the payment capabilities of buy-to-play users in the future. The average price has long been around 10 yuan, with product depth limiting the increase in unit price. TapTap buy-to-play games have an average price of about 10 yuan, constrained by the depth of content. Mobile buy-to-play games mainly attract users through themes or gameplay, but the pricing is influenced by mobile consumption habits and low pricing of domestic PC buy-to-play games, which restricts the increase in price. TapTap Developer Service Status As an important bridge connecting developers with players, TapTap provides developers with a wealth of product capabilities. It offers technical capabilities integrated with the TapTap ecosystem, easy-to-use data analysis, open user ecosystems, event operation tools, and compliance assistance. This helps developers address development, distribution, and operational pain points, providing necessary services throughout the lifecycle from pre-booking to testing, launch, and long-term operation. Familiarity with platform features and understanding platform policies can effectively improve developers’ operational efficiency within the station. TapTap has built a good cooperation channel and information transmission mechanism for developers, helping them achieve operational goals more efficiently. TapTap Operation Document Collection The TapTap operation document collection integrates 10 business modules including ‘game operation, advertising placement, resource exchange, brand cooperation, platform information, live broadcasting, and policy safety’, totaling 126 operational documents. It aims to help developer partners master platform operation skills more efficiently. TapTap innovatively provides developers with a ‘resource exchange platform’, where developers can exchange REP traffic gold through methods such as accessing TapSDK, in-game jumps, and off-site media promotion. Traffic gold can be used to exchange for exposure in the station’s information flow or on other media platforms; currently, more than 3,000 manufacturers have registered, with thousands of active games per month and hundreds of millions of traffic gold distributed. As of October 2024, TapTap has more than 1,000 exclusive games, with a total download volume of over 720 million and more than 90 million pre-orders. TapTap provides exclusive launch, pre-booking, testing, and other forms, offering traffic support, resource promotion, and distribution support. TapTap in-station advertising placement has increased, with a 43% increase in exposure compared to the previous year, accounting for 10% of the game industry’s advertising market share. More and more developers are placing advertisements on TapTap for the first time when launching new games, increasing the scale of acquisition during the launch period.
TapTap is friendly to small and medium-sized developers with low investment costs and is committed to enabling developers to acquire users in a more ‘affordable’ way. The activation costs of categories such as二次元 and Chinese style have decreased. On one hand, this is because some categories are more in line with the user portraits of the platform. On the other hand, TapTap continuously optimizes advertising algorithms to improve conversion efficiency, allowing advertisers to place ads at a people-friendly cost.
During 2023 – 2024, the consumption proportion of advertisers’ bids through oCPA (intelligent optimization tool) has been continuously increasing. More and more developers are willing to feed back the post-game link data of games to TapTap and efficiently obtain high-quality paying users through model learning to improve the advertising return on investment. The above content is an extraction of part of the 2024 TapTap Mobile Game Industry White Paper. To obtain the complete document and learn more detailed data and trends, you can scan the QR code below to download.
