The electronic game you are playing may be made in China.
From Genshin Impact Impact to Age of Origins, games produced by Chinese companies are winning hundreds of millions of players overseas. After decades of cooperation with Western and Japanese gaming companies, the Chinese gaming industry is now producing more content that meets the preferences of international players.
According to data from market information company Sensor Tower, out of the 100 mobile games with the highest sales revenue outside of China, 29 are developed by Chinese companies, accounting for nearly one-third; This is an increase from the 24 games released in 2019, when Chinese companies had not yet released some of the globally popular games that gradually surpassed the works of American and Japanese studios.
The United States and Japan are the markets with the highest gaming revenue in China. According to Sensor Tower's data, in the first half of this year, the top 100 Chinese mobile games that made the most money overseas generated $2 billion in revenue in the United States, accounting for nearly one-third of their total overseas revenue. Another quarter of the income comes from Japan.
Due to the Chinese government tightening the issuance of new game distribution licenses and limiting the time for minors to play games, Chinese companies have turned their attention to the $190 billion global electronic game market.
Several companies, including Tencent and Netease, have invested in foreign studios and provided generous rewards to global talent, often investing hundreds of people in developing a game.
Compared to foreign competitors, Chinese companies are moving faster and more actively in investing in gaming projects and talent, "said Serkan Toto, CEO of gaming consulting company Kantan Games.
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is a role-playing game launched by Shanghai studio miHoYo in 2020, and is widely regarded as the first Chinese game to succeed in the world.
According to Sensor Tower's data, the mobile game version of the game earned $5.16 billion globally in the three years after its launch. As a result, Genshin Impact has become the third most profitable game in the world in the same period, second only to Tencent's game Honor of Kings, which mainly earns money from the Chinese market, and the mobile version of popular South Korean game PUBG Mobile.
From the name to the style of animation, Genshin Impact has strong Japanese characteristics. But the storyline and regional design of this game are based on global culture, from medieval Germany to the Tokugawa shogunate era in Japan hundreds of years ago.
At first glance, I thought this was a Japanese game, "said Kazuya Ishida, a 22 year old college student from Tokyo. He also said that there were no mobile games of similar type and quality available in Japan at that time.
From the name to the style of animation, Genshin Impact, a role-playing game, has strong Japanese characteristics.
At the Tokyo Game Show in September this year, Ishida lined up for an hour and a half to experience the turn based role-playing game "Honkai: Star Rail" for a 10 minute miha game. According to the data of Sensor Tower, the mobile version of the game has a global revenue of about 500 million dollars in the first three months after its launch in April this year, which is equivalent to the debut performance of Genshin Impact of 515 million dollars. Income from the United States and Japan accounts for over one-third of the total income.
In October this year, Mihayou held a concert tour in eight countries, where local orchestras played the music of Genshin Impact. Game music concerts are a popular marketing and community operation strategy overseas. Tickets in most cities, including Los Angeles and New York, are sold out within minutes.
Beyond imitation
Genshin Impact and zombie doomsday games Puzzles& Survival and Age of Origins are recent examples of Chinese games imitating foreign aesthetics and playing methods and becoming popular overseas.
For decades, the Chinese gaming industry has accumulated to a considerable extent through labor-intensive work such as art and design; Global gaming companies often commission Chinese companies to engage in art and design work. Western and Japanese game companies have always had strong capabilities in the field of console games, while Chinese companies have already demonstrated their expertise in mobile games; According to data from game market research firm Newzoo, mobile games now account for half of the global gaming industry's revenue.
At present, the Chinese gaming industry is attempting to break through the limitations of replicating foreign successful experiences.
Recently, a martial arts action role-playing game, Black Myth: Wukong, scheduled to be released next year, has sparked heated discussions on social media. This game is based on the classical Chinese novel "Journey to the West" and tells the story of Tang Monk and his disciples who travel to India to seek scriptures. Sun Wukong is a major character in the novel.
The game received positive reviews from trial players on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, who said they were impressed by the game's high-quality graphics and dark and eerie novel style.
Mark Long, the head of the production studio for the shooting game "Shrapnel" based in Seattle, said, "You can combine Chinese mythology and similar stories with popular Western game styles. This is one possible way to achieve success
As Chinese games become increasingly popular, issues such as content censorship and data security may be under scrutiny overseas, similar to the situation faced by the short video application TikTok. Some global players said that they found that games such as Genshin Impact would censor politically sensitive words such as "Hong Kong" and "Taiwan" in in-game chat. US security experts have also raised concerns about the possibility that the Chinese government may obtain data collected from games. The company stated that user data is stored locally and its use is limited to commercial purposes.
Toshihiro Nagoshi, former Chief Creative Officer of Sega under Japanese entertainment company Sega Sammy Holdings and creator of the mafia series game "Yakuza," left Sega in 2021 with a development team and established a studio under NetEase. Mingyue Renyang's studio is developing a console game for global players, helping NetEase attract players from platforms other than mobile games.
Players are now less and less concerned about who makes a game and which country's team makes it, as long as it is attractive to the market, "said Minami Yoshio