China boasts well over a billion gaming-ready mobile devices, according to research from TalkingData. As of Q2 2015, the data analytics firm reported, there were 1.28 billion smartphones and tablets in China that had mobile gaming apps installed, up from 760 million a year earlier.
Though the population of mobile gamers is increasing, the amount of time they are spending on average playing games is not necessarily following the same pattern. TalkingData reported that average time spent gaming on iOS devices had gone up in the past year, though the same metric was down for players on Android devices.
The greatest increases in monthly active users as of June 2015 were in the role-playing (436.3%), action-adventure (236.2%) and card game (233.5%) genres. Logic games had also more than doubled their user base since the same period the prior year. And those user bases are getting more diverse: 35.5% of mobile gaming app users were female as of Q2 2015, up from 28.7% a year earlier.
eMarketer estimates that 466.6 million people in China will play games this year on mobile phones, up 21.2% from 2014 usage levels. By 2019, eMarketer expects more than two-thirds of mobile phone users in China to play games on their devices at least monthly.