China’s video game market brought in more than 350 billion yuan in 2025, close to 49 billion dollars, from over 680 million players. That makes it the biggest gaming market in the world, ahead of the United States, and one of the hardest to enter from the outside. China runs on its own app stores, its own social platforms and its own licensing system, so a launch plan copied from Europe or North America rarely survives contact with the market. It is not a closed market though. Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony and dozens of smaller studios have found an audience here. This guide covers what still works, what changed going into 2026, and how to plan an entry that does not burn your budget in the first month.
Olivier Verot has run GMA from Shanghai since 2012 and has watched three console cycles and two licensing crackdowns reshape how foreign publishers reach Chinese players. He now spends a good part of his time helping game and app studios solve the same problem: getting in front of an audience before a local competitor’s mini-game does.
Short introduction to the gaming industry in China
China has the largest gaming population on earth, ahead of the United States by a wide margin.
In 2020, China counted close to 665 million gamers, a number that jumped again during the pandemic as people stuck at home turned to mobile games to stay in touch with friends. That growth never really stopped. By 2025 the player base had reached 683 million, and the market kept expanding even through several years of tighter game licensing. We break down what changed further down this page.
Many foreign companies have already seized the opportunity, from Ubisoft and Nintendo to Sony and Gameloft. Small studios compete too, and for this tech-savvy population, video games are extremely popular among millennials and Gen Z. Consoles are more common than they used to be, but mobile still leads the industry by a wide margin.
Mobile games in China: a promising market
Thanks to China’s digitalization, the large majority of the population carries a smartphone loaded with games for the commute to school or work. Mobile games made 257.08 billion yuan in 2025, 73.29% of the entire gaming market’s revenue, up 7.92% year on year. Console and PC games still exist, but the industry has adapted around the phone screen, and companies now release mobile versions of their PC and console titles as a matter of course, not an afterthought.
The mobile boom also opened the door to companies that were never in the games business. HTML5 mini-games run directly inside WeChat, Douyin and Alipay, no app store, no install. We go deeper on how that channel actually works a bit further down.
What are the trends in mobile games in China?
RPG, shooting, MOBA, turn-based RPG and strategy have topped the revenue charts for years, and they still do. What has changed is the format around them. A growing share of new hits launch first as a WeChat or Douyin mini-game, often a lighter, faster version of a bigger console or PC title, before a full release follows. If your genre fits a short session, treat the mini-game format as a real product line, not a teaser.
The importance of e-reputation in the gaming industry
As in any sector in China, a strong online reputation decides whether new players give you a chance. China runs on digital tools, so you need to be active on Chinese social media, WeChat and Weibo in particular. Creativity and consistent communication matter more than a big one-off campaign.
Word of mouth is still the most reliable way to reach a wide audience. Gaming forums and community groups are where that word of mouth actually starts, so be present there before you need something from that community.
How to increase your online presence
To increase your visibility, you can use press relations or publish articles in gaming media. Building your own magazine is expensive and rarely worth it. A more efficient route is an H5 brochure on WeChat, or a proper Chinese-language website of your own.
Search engines
If you build a website for the Chinese market, write it in Mandarin. Baidu still decides most of what gets found through search, and an English-only site simply will not rank there.
- If you want to know more about Baidu, read our full guide: Baidu SEO
Search is no longer only a results page, though. Chinese players increasingly ask DeepSeek or Doubao directly which mobile RPG is worth downloading this month, and the AI reads back a synthesized answer built from pages it trusts, not a list of ten blue links. If your patch notes, dev diaries and press coverage live on indexable Chinese-language pages, you have a shot at being the source that gets cited. If they only exist as WeChat posts locked behind a follow, you do not. We wrote more on how this shift plays out for brands after WeChat integrated DeepSeek into its own search.
Social media: a way to increase your brand’s awareness
If you want to win over Chinese players, a Chinese social media presence is not optional. Netizens here discover and judge brands through social platforms first. Storytelling and a real presence on the right networks is what moves brand awareness.
WeChat is the most used app in China, and over the years it has built several features that matter a lot for games specifically.
Through WeChat, you can:
- Interact with followers and keep them updated on brand news
- Run mini-programs, small apps inside WeChat that cover e-commerce, games and more
- Take payments through WeChat Pay
- Advertise directly on the platform
A mini-game is not a stripped-down demo. It is a full, playable game running inside WeChat’s own engine, with no download and no app store review to clear. Someone shares a link in a group chat, you tap it, and you are playing in under three seconds. Nearly 70 WeChat mini-games passed one million daily active users in 2025, and mini-games as a whole on WeChat topped 500 million monthly active users. For a foreign studio, a mini-game version is often the fastest way to get real Chinese players testing your game while a full China license, if you need one, moves through its own timeline. That timeline can run past a year, so start it in parallel, not after.
Weibo works well to build visibility and reach potential players directly. Content spreads fast there, and it is easy to reach millions of netizens with the right post.
- Communicate to a wide audience
- Build brand awareness quickly
- Convert followers into players
- Collaborate with KOLs to widen reach
- Advertise directly on Weibo
Bilibili
Bilibili is a Chinese video platform famous for its anime, comic and games content, close to a Chinese YouTube where viewers submit, watch and overlay live commentary on videos.
Bilibili runs live streaming where the audience talks directly to streamers, mostly around anime, content creation and game strategy. It also hosts ACG-themed mobile games itself, including the Chinese version of Fate/Grand Order. This is the platform for brands that want positive word of mouth built slowly, not a quick banner buy.
Esports is a big part of why Bilibili’s audience, mostly 18 to 35 year-olds, watches as much as it plays. Bilibili Gaming finished runner-up at both the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational and the League of Legends World Championship, and the club’s fan base on the platform grew right along with each run. China’s esports market itself reached 170.05 billion yuan in 2025, up 18.96% year on year. If your game has any competitive depth, a Bilibili content strategy pays off over a year, not over a launch week.
KOLs: an effective way to increase your sales
KOLs, key opinion leaders, are extremely influential in China. Think of them as the Chinese equivalent of Western influencers, except their entire job is to move people from watching to buying, on WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Douyin or live streaming.
Send your game to a KOL who specializes in gaming and ask for a review, a let’s-play series, or a live stream session with other players, followed by their honest opinion to their community. Done well, this builds a real community around your game rather than a single spike of downloads that disappears in a week.
Douyin is where this now matters most for mobile titles. Gaming KOL campaigns on Douyin drive real purchase decisions, and research consistently shows that 74% of Chinese consumers make buying decisions based on influencer recommendations. For gaming brands specifically, this channel has become the primary way to acquire new mobile players, ahead of paid banner buys.
Mobile banners
Mobile banners carry none of the negative baggage they have in Western markets. Chinese users are used to them, and a well-made banner still moves traffic. To stand out from the flood of competing ads, build banners with real interaction, not a static image and a call to action nobody reads.
Be creative and adapt to the Chinese market
Video games are one of the most competitive and toughest sectors in China. To stand out, adapt to how Chinese consumers actually spend their time. Commuters on the train have time on their hands, which is exactly why train advertising still works for games.
Chinese gaming company Duoyi partnered with China High-Speed Rail to mark the 10th anniversary of its long-running franchise Shenwu (神武), with stickers on the outside of trains and tablets built into the seats. Nobody scrolled past that one.
How Kerstin’s studio reached Chinese players before her publishing license came through
Kerstin runs a twelve-person mobile game studio near Cologne, Germany. Her casual RPG had done well in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, so she assumed a Chinese version of the same launch playbook would work: translate the store listing, buy user acquisition on the app stores, wait for downloads.
It did not. Over six weeks she spent close to 40,000 euros on app store ads and picked up barely 300 installs, at a cost per install that made no sense for a free-to-play title. Part of the problem was licensing: her game had no NPPA approval yet, so several major Android app stores in China would not list it at all. The rest was distribution. A translated app listing sitting in an unfamiliar store, with zero social proof, gave a Chinese player no reason to trust it over a local title.
What worked was skipping the app store altogether. Her team built a lighter WeChat mini-game version of the same RPG in six weeks, playable with one tap and no install. She paired the launch with fifteen micro KOLs in the gaming and anime niches on Douyin, each posting a short clip built around one specific mechanic in the game rather than a generic trailer, with a tracked link straight into the mini-game. The mechanism was simple: players could try the actual game in three seconds from inside a video they were already watching, instead of being asked to trust a brand they had never heard of.
Over the following twelve weeks the mini-game logged just over 41,000 unique players and more than 2,300 pre-registrations for the full China release, at a cost per player under 3 yuan, against the roughly 65 euros per install she had been paying on the app store campaign. Her NPPA license is still in progress. The mini-game bought her a real, measurable Chinese audience while she waits for it, instead of a dead campaign and an empty store listing.
China’s gaming market in 2026: what actually changed
The numbers first. China’s domestic gaming market hit 350.79 billion yuan in 2025, up 7.68% year on year, according to the official 2025 China Game Industry Report. The user base reached 683 million players. Mobile games alone brought in 257.08 billion yuan, 73.29% of total revenue.
The licensing situation has also shifted, and the earlier version of this article understated it. Regulators approved 1,771 games in 2025, the highest annual total since 2018, made up of 1,676 domestic titles and 95 imported ones, per Niko Partners’ year-end count. August alone saw 173 approvals, the highest single month of the year. That is real movement for foreign publishers, but keep your timeline honest: getting a license approved still takes years of groundwork, not months.
What changed the most is the distribution map. Mini-games inside WeChat and Douyin are now where a large part of the action happens. The domestic mini-game market generated 53.54 billion yuan in 2025, up 34.39% year on year, and it is now a mixed monetization business, with in-app purchases at 68.1% of revenue and advertising climbing to 31.9%. On Douyin specifically, mini-game revenue roughly doubled year on year, active users grew 120%, and the platform’s mini-games reached 171 million monthly active users by August, with players aged 18 to 40 making up more than 85% of that base.
For brands in adjacent categories, such as consumer goods, apparel or lifestyle, gaming sponsorships and in-game collaborations have become a real channel. Co-branding in China now routinely includes gaming IP, and it works both directions: game studios borrow credibility from fashion and lifestyle names, and those brands borrow reach from a captive gaming audience.
What this means for your brand in China
- Build your licensing timeline into your go-to-market plan from day one. Approvals are moving faster, but 95 imported titles cleared in all of 2025 is still a small number. You need a local partner with a publishing license, a properly localized build, and patience measured in years, not months.
- Think mini-game first, full game second. A WeChat or Douyin mini-game version lets you reach real Chinese players without waiting on NPPA approval, and it doubles as a market test before you commit to a full release, the way it did for Kerstin’s studio above.
- Brief gaming KOLs on Douyin and Bilibili around specific mechanics, not generic hype. Budget for three to six months of steady content, not one launch spike. Chinese audiences spot and ignore one-shot marketing fast.
- Treat esports and community as long-term infrastructure, not a campaign line item. Bilibili’s audience does not respond to ads. It responds to content that feels native to the platform: creator partnerships, fan art, community events.
- Publish where AI search can find you. Keep patch notes, dev updates and press coverage on indexable Chinese-language pages, not locked inside a WeChat follower wall, so DeepSeek and Doubao can cite you when a player asks what to download next.
FAQ
Do I need an NPPA license to launch my game in China?
For a full native app release with in-app purchases, yes, and it applies to domestic and imported titles alike. A WeChat or Douyin mini-game version can reach players earlier, but regulators have been tightening compliance requirements around mini-games too, so treat a mini-game as a fast, cheap way to test demand, not a permanent way around licensing.
How long does licensing actually take?
Plan for a year at minimum, often longer, once you count the paperwork, the content review, and the local publishing partner search. Only 95 imported games cleared the entire process in 2025. Start the process the same month you start marketing groundwork, not after your game is finished.
What budget should I plan for a first campaign in China?
It depends heavily on genre and platform mix, but a realistic first test, mini-game build plus a KOL seeding round on Douyin or Bilibili, tends to run in the low tens of thousands of euros, well under what most studios budget for an app store user acquisition push that a Chinese player never sees.
Should I work with a local publisher or go direct?
Most foreign studios need a local publishing partner at some point, mainly for the license itself and for payment and platform relationships you cannot access from outside China. That does not mean handing them your entire China strategy. Keep community management, KOL relationships and creative direction close, and use the publisher for what only a license holder can do.
Contact us if you want to promote your video game in China
We have run gaming campaigns from both sides of this problem: helping foreign studios get their first Chinese players and helping brands borrow reach from gaming platforms. We know which platform fits a given genre, what a realistic first budget looks like, and which KOLs actually move installs instead of just views. If you want to promote or sell your video game in China, contact us and tell us where your project stands, license included or not, and we will tell you honestly what to do first.
You should also read our complete guide: The video gaming industry in China is booming
