China has unveiled the first official regulation, banning the use of virtual currency in trade of real goods and services to limit its possible impact on the nation’s real financial system [...]

Students make up the biggest group of online game players in China, followed by IT and media industry workers, according to a survey released recently, Beijing Business Today reported. The survey, jointly conducted by 17173.com, a Chinese online game Website, and iResearch Consulting Group, said almost 60 percent of gamers were in their 20s and 95 percent were below 35 years old.

High school graduates accounted for 35 percent of Chinese gamers, the report said. One-third of the respondents have a college education and 23 percent a university diploma. Forty-five percent of the gamers were female, who favored to join in the games with the identification of opposite sex…

China could become the world’s biggest online market within two years: the number of Chinese netizens has surpassed 123 million and number of people with access to broadband connection rose by 45.3 percent during the first half of the year to 77 million. Studies show that a typical Chinese consumer spends an average of 17.9 hours per month (36 min./day) engaged in popular online activities such as chatting, blogging, gaming, and shopping [...]

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the population of Internet users in China by last June is over 123 million — 63% of those people have broadband access. More that 20 million chinese play online games, and the e-commerce revenue have grown 50% in relation to last year numbers. Estimates of the revenue of the online gaming industry points to a total of 1.3 billion dollars by 2009, an annual growth of 35%, according to IDC. Such growth ended pushing the numbers of other sectors up: online games brought 17.3 billion Yuan (2.14 billion dollars) to Telecommunication industry, 7.1 billion Yuan (887.5 million dollars) to the Information Technology industry, and 30 million Yuan (3.7 million dollars) to the Publishing industry [...]