Shenzhen is home to 4,498 game companies and 26 of the 44 listed game companies in the province are based in Shenzhen, according to the 2018 annual report of the game industry in Guangdong Province.
The report, released Tuesday at the 2018 annual meeting of Guangdong’s game industry and the award ceremony of the Golden Diamond Awards, said that the total revenue of Guangdong’s game industry in 2018 was 181.1 billion yuan (US$26.7 billion), up 8.4 percent year on year and contributing 76.2 percent to the country’s total revenue of US$34.4 billion, sznews.com reported yesterday.
According to the report, the game enterprises in Guangdong Province are mainly based in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which has 2,768 firms.
Shenzhen’s revenue from the game sector made up 68 percent of the total game revenue in Guangdong last year. The province’s amount of online games represented 19.4 percent of the global total.
Although the development of the game industry in the country generally slowed down in 2018, Guangdong recorded fast development with a total of 3,462 new game firms registered last year, achieving a growth rate of 81 percent.
The fast growth of the game industry in Guangdong Province was driven by preferential policies by the government, which lowered the threshold of the industry. Resources brought by local Internet giants, such as Shenzhen-based Tencent and NetEase, also play an important role in the development of the game industry. Many game enterprises in other cities and provinces like Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu have even established offices in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.
Enterprises with growing investment have started to seek IPOs, and five game enterprises went public in 2018, the report said.
Guangdong’s game export revenue last year reached 27 billion yuan, increasing 23.8 percent from a year earlier, of which 19.93 billion yuan was for online games and the remaining 6.7 billion yuan was for game consoles.