From In-Game Credits to Season Passes: What Tencent’s Reports Reveal About Spending

Separate company revenue, genre composition and platform rankings

These three sources are useful for different purposes. They are not interchangeable.

Source	What it can answer	What it cannot directly establish
Tencent financial reports	Changes in the company’s games business across years, regions and product portfolios	Complete MOBA, shooter and RPG revenue splits, or player demographics
Industry reports	Genre, platform and monetization patterns within a specified market and sample	Tencent’s own revenue distribution by genre
Apple rankings and third-party estimates	Product performance on a particular platform over a particular period	Whole-market revenue including Android, advertising and other channels, or individual payers’ spending distribution

Tencent’s reporting categories require particular care. Earlier online-games revenue, device-based smartphone and PC figures, and more recent domestic and international categories do not consistently divide the business along the same axis. Some smartphone revenue was also allocated to social networks. Adding every figure together creates a seemingly larger games business through double counting.

Mobile added entry points without erasing PC

Tencent reported approximately RMB 9.51 billion in online-games revenue in 2010 and RMB 56.59 billion in 2015. The separately disclosed 2015 smartphone-games figure of approximately RMB 21.3 billion was on a gross-to-gross basis and cannot be added to the former number. It shows that mobile had become a substantial business, not that the report contained an extra pool of revenue to count twice.

Quarterly online-games revenue in 2016 was approximately RMB 17.085 billion, 17.124 billion, 18.166 billion and 18.469 billion. Adding those figures gives about RMB 70.84 billion for the year. In 2017, online-games revenue was approximately RMB 97.88 billion. During this period, established IP, social relationships and competitive play reached phones, changing the devices and situations through which people could enter games.

But evidence is missing between company growth and player migration. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Tencent described healthy smartphone-game activity alongside a quarter-on-quarter decline in ARPU. This shows that activity and revenue per user need not move together. It does not establish that new users necessarily arrived first and paid later, or reveal where a particular group of PC players went.

Mobile is better understood as an expansion of accessible playing situations. Players no longer always needed to sit at a computer, but operators still needed lasting reasons to participate: progression, competition, cosmetics and social ties. Easier entry does not make every product lightweight or eliminate the value of controls and relationships in PC games.

From an individual item to rewards across a season

Long-running operations change what triggers spending. Players can buy an item at one moment, or buy an additional reward track, collection or benefits over a season. Tencent’s second-quarter 2019 materials said season passes in certain key products were broadly complementary to existing item sales and helped engagement.

This is not a universal fee for permission to participate. Many products remain free to play; payment buys additional rewards or ways to express oneself. Games also treat winning, progression and cosmetics differently. Buying a skin should not be described as buying a better chance of winning.

For operators, revenue therefore depends more on timely content updates, attractive rewards and continued community participation. For players, spending may arise not only from “I need an item” but also from “this season is worth investing in.” This helps explain how products create reasons to pay. It cannot establish that paying users are younger, wealthier or a different demographic group than before.

Tencent’s online-games revenue reached approximately RMB 156.1 billion in 2020. Smartphone- and PC-related figures used additional attribution rules and must not be added again. By then, the useful question was not simply which device contributed most, but which long-running products could keep renewing themselves and which new releases could follow them.

Domestic and international growth use different product portfolios

The table follows Tencent’s recent domestic and international games categories. Amounts are in RMB 100 million; totals and shares are calculated. This is neither the full set of statutory reporting segments nor a genre breakdown.

Year	Domestic games	International games	Total	International share
2021	1288	455	1743	26.1%
2022	1239	468	1707	27.4%
2023	1267	532	1799	29.6%
2024	1397	580	1977	29.3%
2025	1642	774	2416	32.0%

The international share rose overall from 2021, with a decline along the way. Domestic revenue came under pressure in 2022, followed by growth from evergreen titles and new releases. International operations involve different markets, studios and products. This is not simply evidence that domestic players stopped paying, nor can all overseas growth be attributed to one genre of games developed in China.

A portfolio diversifies dependence while making operations more demanding. A product mature in one region may only be entering its growth phase elsewhere. New releases in the same genre may compete with a company’s older games for player time. Aggregate growth shows the portfolio’s outcome; it does not establish that all revenue from new games is incremental.

Genres redistribute revenue rather than simply replacing one another

In the China Game Industry Report’s sample of the top 100 mobile products by revenue, RPGs accounted for 29.55% in 2023, MOBAs for 17.01%, and shooters for 14.70%. In 2025, the corresponding shares were 15.10%, 19.45% and 18.29%. These are changes in revenue weights within a sample. They do not mean nobody plays RPGs, and cannot be converted into player time or Tencent’s genre revenue.

Mobile games accounted for approximately 73.29% of domestic market revenue in 2025. Mini-program games generated approximately RMB 53.535 billion that year, with in-app purchases contributing about 68.11%. “Mini-program games” does not mean all casual games; the report uses a separate category for the mobile casual market. Easy entry does not imply reliance on advertising alone. Conversely, a high in-app-purchase share does not mean every user spends heavily. 2025 industry report

The overseas sample differs again. Among the top 100 Chinese-developed mobile games by overseas revenue in 2025, strategy products accounted for approximately 49.96%. The denominator is neither all domestic games nor Tencent’s entire international business. It suggests that product mixes differ between markets, but cannot directly explain the sources of one company’s growth.

Apple rankings help form questions, not reconstruct company accounts

Apple’s China top-grossing pages and third-party rankings can identify products worth observing: whether evergreen games still perform, whether new mechanics reach the top, and which genres coexist. But dynamic pages change. Without a dated historical record, today’s list cannot reconstruct the market on a past day.

Even an archived list supplies ranks, not amounts. The same number-one position can represent very different revenue at different times. China’s App Store alone also excludes other channels and advertising. Sensor Tower and other third parties have their own estimation scopes; their figures cannot simply be spliced into audited financial reports.

A ranking is therefore better used to pose a question that other evidence can help answer. A shooter rising in the charts invites examination of its release cycle, live operations and channel performance. It does not yield “Tencent’s shooter revenue this year,” much less establish that a particular group of RPG players moved to that game.

Spending profiles can describe situations without pretending to track individuals

The sources support descriptions of different reasons to pay: characters and communities built through long-term involvement in PC games; easier access through phones; expression through skins and collections; periodic choices around seasonal rewards; and shorter paths from trying a mini-program game to making a purchase.

One person may participate in several of these, or play only one title for years. Without longitudinal evidence following the same players, a company revenue curve cannot be presented as their migration route.

The clearer change over these fifteen years is how companies organize products, platforms and charging mechanisms. Genres have not eliminated one another in sequence, and spending has not neatly moved from one motivation to the next. When reading the next financial report, I would first ask which reporting category grew, which products drove it, and how new releases relate to older games. Connecting those questions is more useful than inventing an unsupported demographic portrait for each generation of players.

References

写作附记

Original Prompt

$blog-writer analyzes Tencent’s financial reports and the publicly available Apple game revenue rankings. Tencent is a large gaming company in China with a long service history. Based on Tencent’s financial data, this analyzes the revenue of various game types over the years, as well as the changes in game types and the shifts in user payment profiles within the gaming industry.

Rewrite the articles from these three months. Note: if an article was not written by AI, do not rewrite it.