This week I went to the Online Gaming China 2006 conference in the Renaissance Pudong hotel in Shanghai. It was a small but high-level conference, with executives from mainly the US, Japan, Korea and China. The event gave a good overview of the current state of the online gaming market in China and its future trends.

Gaming started in China around 10 years ago: the first PC game studio was opened in 1995, and the first foreign studio (Ubisoft) opened its doors a year later. At that time not many people had access to computers, but already in 1998 the first casual game portal started (ourgame.com). Three years later China created its first MMO (Stone Age), followed in 2003 by the first foreign MMO. This MMO, Everquest, was not a big success, leading people to say that foreign games do not work in China. But the huge success of World of Warcraft in China proved these people wrong.

The demographics of China