Gaming sector recovery on flamboyant display at ChinaJoy expo

SHANGHAI: A long-haired sorcerer wearily checked his smartphone as elves and androids bustled past at the digital entertainment expo ChinaJoy on Friday, the crowds a testament to the local gaming industry’s tentative recovery after a period on pause.

China is the world’s largest market for video games, but the sector has been through a tough time in recent years thanks to a government crackdown that restricted player hours and strangled new licences.

But as the vast exhibition halls in Shanghai boomed with the excited chatter of cosplaying attendees, industry insiders were upbeat about the future.“I fully see the recovery is happening. And we truly believe the market of China will keep growing rapidly,” the Shanghai managing director of gaming giant Ubisoft, Yang Zhi Hong, told AFP.

At rival company Blizzard’s booth, a row of players wearing headsets frowned in concentration while onlookers watched their progress on a big screen.Blizzard, which produces the globally popular ‘World of Warcraft’ (WoW), will make a much-anticipated return to China in August after a contract dispute with Chinese partner NetEase saw its servers in the country taken offline for more than a year and a half.

“Being able to play on the Chinese servers again is like returning home from wandering around foreign lands with people whose languages I don’t speak,” an ‘extremely excited’ WoW fan named Wang Wenzheng told AFP.

WoW attracted millions of Chinese users at its peak, but that figure is small potatoes compared to some homegrown gaming companies’ stats. Popular games like Tencent’s ‘League of Legends’ or MiHoYo’s ‘Genshin Impact’ boast tens of millions of monthly domestic players.