- The latest statistics show that there are 845.4 million WeChat users in China
- Mini-program mobile games, also known as Minigames, generated $2.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2024 in China
Publishing giant Tencent needs no introduction, with its incredibly popular titles PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings continuing to be hit. However, something the industry discusses less when it comes to Tencent is its messaging app WeChat, and how it owns most Minigames on the messenger platform.
WeChat is the main ecosystem app in China, pretty much replacing all of the usual Silicon Valley staples in just one app.
The latest statistics show that in 2024, there were 845.4 million WeChat users in China, which accounts for 60.1% of the total population. If we look at the overall user base, WeChat has 1.36 billion users worldwide.
Mini-program mobile games (mostly known as Weixin/WeChat Minigames) generated $2.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2024 in China, up 60% year over year.
From this number, $1.25 billion was IAP revenue, an 81% growth rate, and $1.03 billion was ad revenue, a 40% growth rate. For comparison, the overall Chinese games market had a revenue of $20.3 billion in the first half of the year, with 674 million users.
The expected MAU of the minigame market will exceed 500 million users in China this year, with an average daily play session of 60 minutes per day per user. These minigames are produced very fast (two to three months) by small teams ranging from five to 30 people, with the development cost around $140K per minigame.
This is the point where you start to see that the word “minigame” is a little bit misleading. In the end, by their nature, these are fully fledged mobile games that just start with the 50MB installation file and can download up to 600MB more later as they unfold.
You can clearly see how a minigames platform was given a big priority compared to Western experiments by social media giants that don’t understand mobile games.
This starkly contrasts with the latest Western attempt by Facebook Messenger, which launched “instant games” in 2016, with a 6Mb initial loading file and currently up to 200Mb bundle.
As WeChat is owned by Tencent, the biggest gaming company in the world, you can clearly see how a minigames platform was given a big priority compared to Western experiments by social media giants that don’t understand mobile games.
Recently, for instance, the platform’s top-grossing charts were taken by the launch of Whiteout Survival, a full version of the mobile hit Whiteout Survival.
These charts show some of the top-grossing mobile games, such as Nobody’s Adventure Chop-Chop and Bang Bang Survivor. Of course, the day-one retention benchmarks are nowhere close to the usual mobile user behavior, but with the current growth, this is a growth pain rather than a problem.
Interestingly, only users of the Chinese version of WeChat can see these charts, and they are not available to the international client.
The platform offers a perfect testing environment, where many big mobile games in China were first released on this platform as a proof of concept and later iterated and released on mobile stores.
There are multiple dominant genres (nearly all of them RPGs) prevalent in the minigames market, with Loot Box RPG (Nobody’s Adventure Chop-Chop) being the biggest genre per revenue share, with around 30% of the whole market.
In the end, the platform offers a perfect testing environment, where many big mobile games in China were first released on this platform as a proof of concept and later iterated and released on mobile stores.
For instance, “Fingertips Warriors” (approximate translation) is a mix of 2D Arcade Idle and 4X gameplay, which makes it a truly unique combination. You can also see it fourth in the top-grossing charts in the image above.
There is no Western game that has similar characteristics, even though the Arcade Idle genre is very popular in the West, with games such as My Perfect Hotel or Dreamdale. I think it is a matter of time before similar mechanics are adapted into a Western iteration.
For product-oriented professionals, it is important to follow the trends on this platform similarly as you should follow the top-grossing games in Korea or Japan to see diverse game design approaches to different challenges.
Our podcast community members told us multiple times that the “new” game we just reviewed on the podcast was already a top-grossing game in the minigame charts for quite some time or that there was an older original game that the Western version was copying.
If you are wondering where to get this information, luckily, we met an expert, Lemon, who runs the most prominent blog on this topic in China.
You can find it here by using the default browser for auto-translation. Lemon was also kind enough to share a treasure trove of information about this platform with us on the podcast.
