中国游戏企业综合指数Gaming Industry

The game industry is one of the most representative cultural-product forms of the digital age; it is both a large-scale digital-economy industry and an important medium carrying original content and the expression of Chinese culture. As of 2024, China's actual sales revenue in the game market exceeded RMB 320 billion, and the overseas-market actual revenue of self-developed games was about USD 18.6 billion; local game enterprises have become a force that cannot be ignored in the global game landscape.

However, judging by 'revenue scale' alone cannot distinguish whether an enterprise is a 'porter of paid-traffic agencies' or a 'creator of original IP', nor can it measure its real contribution to cultural outreach and technological innovation. To this end, this index does not copy any public ranking, but adopts the CPPPS proprietary algorithm to comprehensively evaluate 20 representative Chinese game enterprises across four dimensions—Scale (revenue, users), Quality (net profit, market value), Innovation (R&D investment, original IP) and Contribution (overseas revenue).

The model log-transforms all large-span monetary indicators (revenue, net profit, market value, R&D, overseas revenue) to prevent head enterprises from 'dominating alone' and monopolizing the scores, and linearly normalizes bounded indicators such as original IP and user count. The composite index is obtained by four-dimensional weighted summation, in which the 'Contribution' dimension (cultural outreach) is the CPPPS distinctive feature and an evaluation perspective generally missing from most international rankings.

Evaluation results: Tencent Games, NetEase Games, miHoYo, Lilith Games and 37 Interactive Entertainment rank in the top five. Overall, head developers strong in both scale and overseas expansion rank ahead, and boutique developers with outstanding original IP (such as representative enterprises in the ACG and female-oriented tracks) rise to the front on the strength of their innovation and overseas performance. This ranking is based mainly on public-knowledge approximations, uniformly marked 'subject to official figures', permanently free and public, and for research and reference only.

The evaluation of game enterprises cannot look only at revenue; it must also look at the way they create value. The four dimensions of this algorithm correspond to the following theoretical bases:

Each indicator is first range-standardized to [0,1]; large-span monetary indicators are log-transformed before standardization to avoid head monopoly. The four sub-indices and the composite index are as follows:

Here the superscript ′ denotes the value after range-standardization to [0,1]; log₁₀ takes the common logarithm of monetary indicators such as revenue, net profit, market value, R&D and overseas revenue, compressing order-of-magnitude differences so that the second tier and long-tail enterprises are also comparable.

Dimension weights: Scale 0.30, Quality 0.25, Innovation 0.25, Contribution 0.20. Scale is the foundation but accounts for only thirty percent, preventing 'scale-only thinking'; Quality and Innovation each account for a quarter, highlighting 'quality growth' and 'original-IP driven' development; and Contribution accounts for twenty percent, the core feature distinguishing CPPPS from single-scale ranking.

Revenue, net profit and market value are taken from the annual reports and public market data of listed companies (Tencent Holdings, NetEase, 37 Interactive Entertainment, Century Huatong, Perfect World, G-bits, IGG, Giant Network, Kaiying Network, XD Inc., Yoozoo Games, Bingchuan Network, CMGE and Ourpalm, etc.); the revenue and valuation of unlisted enterprises (miHoYo, Lilith Games, Hypergryph, Papergames, Kuro Games and Lingxi Games) adopt common-knowledge approximations from public reports; overseas revenue references the public calibers of third-party monitoring such as Sensor Tower, data.ai (AppMagic) and Gamma Data (CNG), and the Game Industry Report of the Game Publishing Committee of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association (GPC); and original IP is a CPPPS subjective approximate score based on the number and influence of enterprises' self-developed IP. All monetary data are public-knowledge approximations, subject to official disclosure.

The limitations of this model: (1) the original-IP score is subjective; (2) the revenue and valuation of unlisted enterprises carry estimation errors; (3) the Contribution dimension currently uses overseas revenue as a single proxy variable, while contributions such as tax, employment and import substitution are not included due to the lack of unified public data; (4) the user count is a whole-platform cumulative caliber that differs from the true active-user count (MAU). The ranking is for research and reference only.