Things are still growing in the Chinese game industry, with profits continuing to look like their breaking 2019 numbers. But this growth wouldn’t be so apparent due to the loss of revenue coming this past month.

Gamma Data shared their monthly numbers this week, and it showed a 10% drop in revenue from August to 15.9 Billion RMB. Though the revenue dropped by double digits compared to last year, the revenue increased, leading to positivity amongst the group.

In fact, the revenue from this last quarter ended up being the second most since the previous 15 months. This shows that the Chinese market will most likely beat last year’s 230 billion by 25% if the trend continues, according to the group.

If you look at the top games this month, nothing has changed in the top 3 yet again, thanks to a few significant events that kept gamers playing and paying, such as a new fighter being released for Honor of Kings. But with 22 new games coming out (the most monthly new releases for the year), we can see a lot of changes to the top ten next month.

One game that shot up this month was the new game "New Legend of the Condor Heroes: Iron and Blood" (新射雕群侠传之铁血丹心) that we talked about last month. This game built with Cocos not only became a big hit in its first month, but it also jumped to the top 10 in September. This comes from being a fun game and the amount they have been spending on marketing the game.  DataEye had a detailed story on the subject. (the story is in Chinese)

How you market a new game in China

One exciting topic shared this month was research done by Gamma Data with our friends, Lillith Games, makers of the Cocos-built game, AFK Arena.

Their game, before AFK Arena, named Rise of Kingdoms, was a big hit internationally for the past two years and is got an official launch last month in China. Lilith Games had decided to advertise the game during the past month, and their results are remarkable.

The company started to advertise on traffic platforms (14 platforms with 86.9% in Tencent ads, and the rest in other platforms) and non-gaming apps (31 apps with Kaixin/QQ/Toutiao taking over 80% of the budget) to improve downloads. Gamma Data estimates that the revenue from the advertising will exceed 500 million yuan.

To better understand how they advertised, you can see how many ads they placed per day in the month of September. The game was officially released on the 23rd as you can see the growth of advertising grows from there.