Possibly that this huge and relatively new to Steam gaming audience may have an important effect on the PC market as a whole. Coincidentally, I came across this recent blog post from the dev of Defender's Quest today in which he details that Chinese customers are responsible for keeping him afloat right now despite his game being five years old.

No, this is racist: "It's okay to be white."

I'd be curious to know as well. I always assumed that the Chinese don't care about PC gaming at all and that it's all about mobile games for them. A few months back I talked to some guy who was working for a company that creates games for mobile devices and was surprised to hear that he wanted, basically, to quit his job and get the hell out of Dodge. I was surprised to hear that, since I had assumed that companies that produce mobile apps would stand a chance to rake in big bucks in China, but he said that there is just no way now for small companies to survive in the current market and if one company strikes gold and develops a successful app, they get immediately bought up by a major like Tencent.

I always perceived the PC gaming market there to be a barren wasteland. I found a total of 3 (!) shops in Beijing that sold legit copies of PC games. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. The shops I did find had a selection of approx 60/40 Western games/JRPGs (including those by Chinese developers). The Western section is basically good old games incarnate, save for a recent-ish Street Fighter game (I think it was IV), all of the games were at least a decade old: Unreal Tournament 2004, Gothic 2&3, Jade Empire, Rogue Trooper, Painkiller, Tribes: Vengeance, XIII,... even Bioshock (which unfortunately turned out to be DRMed). So I always assumed the market for PC games to be minimal, so I'm actually surprised to see this development. I guess gog saw the same untapped potential, they wouldn't have opened a Chinese storefront instead. Gog has come a long way as far as China is concerned: Just a few years ago it was a barely-usable mess where literally nothing worked (including downloading your games), which probably took quite a bit of work.

AND NOW:

A white paper on Red China.

What is the point of any thread ? I like statistics and thought it would make an interesting topic.

This is not just about China and gaming. Many tech websites write articles about statistics like this. They post about usage of different operating systems, market share of AMD vs Intel/Nvidia, the adoption rate of high resolution monitors, new GPUs, CPUs... But, often their numbers are based on limited set of data, mostly coming from US/Europe, since that is the only data available and is not representative of the global state of things. This is a unique opportunity to take a peek at the state of the PC platform from where this type of information was not available before, and to get a better global picture.

I already highlighted some things that were surprising to me:
- It seems Windows 7 is globally more relevant than people thought
- Nvidia and Intel are kicking AMD's ass more than any previous report would have suggested. This is either good, because it leaves them a lot of opportunity to grow, or terrible, because they could get completely wiped out...

Yeah, you got all of that right. Tencent did say that they were putting a foot into the gaming market. And once they are all geared up (if they did what they said they would), they could give steam a run for their money. Tencent is a big player and they know their own market well.

Plus, China is very, very mobile orientated as you said. Smart phones are their main devices, not computers. They don't even like checking emails (except for business). Most people there use phone app messenger systems as their main mode of communication. Maybe, it's the cybercafe thing. And it stands to reason that the cybercafes would be outfitted with better computers.

Also, I don't know about Defender's Quest, but 11bit studios and that developer with the board game had good success with the market where sales over there made up a decent chunk of profits. However, both games had mobile ports and the board game had an in-game purchase model with multi-player, I believe. And both the studios know a thing or two about directly marketing stuff in China, which is different than it is over here. I remembered seeing someone talking about "This War of Mine" (mobile), and that person isn't really the sort that bothers about western websites, beyond what is already viral.