Information from China Game Industry Annual Conference held in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, revealed that the market scale of the Chinese game industry reached CNY44.61 billion in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 34%.

An investigation report on the Chinese game industry for 2011 published during the conference stated that the actual sales within the Chinese game market, including PC online games, mobile online games, and PC stand-alone games, reached CNY44.61 billion in 2011.

The actual sales of PC online games, covering the income from online MMORPG games, web page games, and social networking games, was CNY42.85 billion, a year-on-year increase of 32.4%. Of the total, actual sales of Chinese self-developed games increased by 40.7% year-on-year to CNY27.15 billion, accounting for 63.4% of the overall sales.

The report predicted that by 2016, the actual sales of the Chinese PC online game market will reach CNY85.8 billion; and the compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2016 will be 14.9%.

According to the report, the actual sales of PC online MMORPG games in China increased by 30.2% year-on-year to CNY36.69 billion in 2011; and the sales are expected to reach CNY71.11 billion by 2016, with compound annual growth rate of 14.2% from 2012 to 2016. The actual sales of mobile online games increased by 86.8% year-on-year CNY1.7 billion; and the sales is expected to reach CNY7.5 billion by 2016, with compound annual growth rate of 34.6%. The actual sales of PC stand-alone games increased by 301.3% to CNY61 million, with issuing of seven new games during the entire year.

The report also showed that the number of users of PC online games in China had reached 120 million by the end of 2011, an increase of 9.1% compared with 2010; and the number is expected to reach 140 million by 2016. Of all users, the number of paid users increased by 46% year-on-year to 66.32 million in 2011; and the number is expected to reach 75.35 million.