Staff Reporter |
Editor | Wen Shuqi
As the annual spotlight event for China’s gaming industry, ChinaJoy doesn’t just showcase the hottest titles on the market — it also serves as the stage where the industry’s most pressing conversations take shape.
Unsurprisingly, going overseas became one of the defining keywords at this year’s ChinaJoy. According to data released during the event, from January to June this year, China’s domestic gaming market generated actual sales revenue of 188.45 billion yuan, up 12.17% year-on-year. Meanwhile, overseas sales revenue from self-developed games hit $12.372 billion, a solid 30.22% jump year-on-year.
During this year’s ChinaJoy, the nation’s first public service platform dedicated to game exports — the Shanghai Online Game Overseas Service Platform (Phase I) — also went live. The platform is designed to offer Shanghai-based game companies professional, systematic support for their international expansion efforts.
These numbers reflect the triumphant first half of Chinese gaming’s global journey. But let’s be honest — the competitive landscape is shifting into an entirely new gear.
Xie Fei, President of Century Huatong, noted during ChinaJoy that game exports have become a shared consensus and a standard practice across China’s digital culture industry. Yet, as the track gets more crowded and product supply grows rapidly, global competition is moving into what she calls a “quality-over-quantity, deep-value cultivation” phase.
In her view, the future battleground is no longer about how wide your market coverage is or how massive your traffic volume gets. It’s about emotional resonance with users, the warmth your brand radiates, and how powerfully your culture travels. “True globalization through localization is never just about language translation or surface-level adaptation,” she said. Companies need to recalibrate everything — from product perception and content logic to how they articulate value.
Over the past decade-plus, Chinese game companies have leaned on their R&D muscle and mature publishing pipelines to expand rapidly overseas. Especially during the mobile gaming boom, paid user acquisition became the go-to strategy for unlocking overseas audiences. With polished ad-buying skills, deep creative-testing experience, and solid publishing chops, the “buy traffic + ship fast” model proved to be a winning formula for a long while. That’s how Chinese studios stormed into Europe, the US, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia with remarkable speed.
But that model is now hitting a wall: traffic still matters, sure, but the rising cost of getting it has become a genuine headache for publishers. Users are still out there, but both acquiring them and keeping them around is getting exponentially harder.“Since late 2024, the shifts in the overseas game user-acquisition market have been pretty dramatic,” Ren Peiyu, VP of Product at overseas marketing service provider MeetSocial, told us.
Third-party analytics firm Sensor Tower’s numbers paint a clear picture: in the first half of 2026, overseas mobile game IAP (in-app purchase) revenue reached $33.1 billion, down 6% quarter-over-quarter, while downloads totaled 22.2 billion, a 4% decline.
Ren’s take: previously, game companies obsessed over ad spend ROI. But as the traffic war intensifies, client demands are stretching further down the funnel — into market intelligence, user operations, community building, and brand marketing. “People aren’t just buying ads anymore; they’re thinking about how to truly steward their user base,” he said.
At the same time, the global gaming industry is fighting for attention against a growing army of entertainment alternatives. Sensor Tower data shows that in 2025, revenue from non-gaming mobile apps surpassed gaming for the first time. Among them, generative AI apps saw total user time balloon 16-fold in just two years, with revenue jumping 232% year-on-year.
That’s where AI comes in — and Chinese game companies are leaning into it harder than most.
“You could say Chinese game developers are the most aggressively competitive in the world,” said Ren, whose company was among the first wave of service providers to support game firms. Through his long-term observation, many of China’s major studios have already integrated AI tools at scale — some are even building out proprietary internal AI systems.
Youzu Interactive, one of Shanghai’s earliest movers in game exports, saw overseas revenue account for 66.5% of its total last year. Zhao Yifan, VP at Youzu, shared at ChinaJoy that AI capabilities are already embedded across two critical pillars of their overseas business: AI now handles 70%-80% of the creative-production workflow, and in localization translation and LQA testing, translation costs alone have been slashed by 80%.
Service providers are also racing to weave AI into the entire overseas marketing chain.MeetSocial rolled out Marvy 2.0 in July this year, bundling all the AI tools needed for overseas marketing — from market insights and strategy formulation to ad delivery. Ren gave a concrete example: before entering a Latin American market, traditional market research would typically take two to three days. With AI pulling together local market data, competitive intel, and social media chatter, a comprehensive analysis report can now be generated in about 20 minutes.
That said, AI isn’t a magic wand for every challenge in going global.Ren told us that localization remains one of the toughest nuts to crack. AI excels at solving efficiency problems, but the real difficulty lies in genuinely understanding local markets and cultural nuances. Take the Middle East — religion and holidays are deeply woven into everything. Japan requires a nuanced grasp of local user habits. Latin America has its own rich tapestry of cultural differences. AI can help companies analyze a market, sure, but whether your content, gameplay design, and operational approach actually hit home with local users? That still demands human judgment.
Zhao Yifan also pointed out that although the gaming industry has evolved from a “channels are king” era to a “traffic operations” era, at its core, it remains a content business. Take Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming — a title that’s been live for years and still contributes steady revenue. That longevity has everything to do with the team’s meticulous, long-term refinement around overseas user needs, from optimizing mobile UI hierarchy to pushing multi-platform PC support.
The transformation in how Chinese game companies grow is fueling demand for more “global” services, and that ripple effect is traveling up and down the industry value chain. We noticed that from overseas ad platforms and data analytics firms to localization service providers, more and more companies are setting up shop in Shanghai, eager to ride the wave of opportunity created by Chinese gaming’s global ambitions.
Inside the BTOB business matchmaking hall, our team spotted Taboola, an overseas advertising company. According to the company, several of its global executives flew to Shanghai specifically for ChinaJoy this year to connect with their China team, clients, and partners. Taboola’s performance advertising platform, Realize, serves Chinese brands going global, using first-party data and performance-driven AI tech to optimize conversion. Taboola said its decision to host an independent booth at ChinaJoy this year reflects its continued commitment to deepening its footprint in the Chinese market and scaling up local investment.
From multinational giants to scrappy marketing startup teams, the energy inside the business matchmaking hall rivaled that of the game demo floors.
For Chinese game companies that have already made the leap abroad, the second half of the overseas journey will be about figuring out, together with the companies in that hall, one big question: how to engineer sustainable growth in markets far from home.
