PS4 and Xbox One sales in China still be exceeding a million sold soon, adding together both the 500,000 legal consoles and the 400,000 imported consoles that have been bought by Chinese gamers. China has had a shaky history with some video games, so this is a very interesting development.
The million units sold from both PS4 and Xbox One sales will be adding to the consoles that are already in the country, and may bring in more by the end of 2016 to take the total up to three million. However, legal software installs have been fairly low in the country; the average is that each console only has around 4 games, but that isn’t the fault of Chinese gamers.
While China may be a manufacturing powerhouse and one of the world’s largest econoies, it is extremely protective of native industries and also very intolerant of games that it finds inappropriate. For instance, Battlefield 4 was banned after its “China Rising” DLC due to the fact that it implied an invasion of China. Oddly enough the actual game, where China was taken over by a military dictator, was allowed to sell at first.
China may also want to protect other Chinese developers from being overwhelmed by Western-developed games. Chinese protectionism when it comes to trademarking and copyright is very high, and it’s because of these sorts of things that games like Legend of Titan and other cheap knockoffs of more popular Western games are coming out and are being allowed to come out.
Despite this, Chinese gamers account for 25 billion dollars in revenue for console games software.
However, if people in China want to play more games, they would have to rely on the Chinese government to change its mind if they want to have more games available in the country, especially since console games software will only account for 1% of the 25 billion dollars, as opposed to the hardware via PS4 and Xbox One sales.
