From “Genshin Impact” to “Age of Origins”: Chinese video games are gaining ground in global commerce

The video game you are currently playing could be made in China .

From Genshin Impact until “The Age of Origins” , titles created by Chinese companies bring hundreds of millions to foreign players. After working for decades with Western and Japanese game companies, the video game industry China now produces more content with international appeal.

Nearly a third – 29 of the top 100 – of the top-grossing mobile games outside China were developed by Chinese companies, according to a market information company. Sensor Tower . That’s up from 24 titles in 2019 before Chinese companies launched global blockbusters, surpassing games made by U.S. and Japanese studios.

The United States and Japan are the countries where Chinese games bring in the most revenue. In the first half of this year, Top 100 Grossing Chinese Mobile Games Generated $2 Billion in the US , almost a third of its revenues come from abroad, according to data from Sensor Tower. Another quarter came from Japan.

Chinese companies have set their sights on the $190 billion global video game market, while Beijing has stepped up the issuance of new game publishing licenses and limited gaming hours for minors.

Companies like Tencent Holdings, TCEHY and NetEase have taken stakes in foreign studios and offered generous compensation to global talent, devoting hundreds of people to the development of a title.

“They are moving faster and are more open and aggressive in their investments in gaming projects and talent than their foreign competitors,” said Serkan Toto, managing director at video game consultancy Kantan Games.

“Genshin Impact,” a role-playing game released in 2020 by Shanghai-based studio miHoYo, is widely considered the first Chinese title to achieve global success.

Its mobile version has grossed $5.16 billion worldwide in the three years since its launch. That makes it the third highest-grossing title in the world after Tencent’s “Honor of Kings,” which made money mainly in China, and “PUBG Mobile,” a mobile adaptation of a South Korean hit, according to Sensor Tower data.

From its name to its anime-style art, “Genshin Impact” has strong Japanese characteristics. But it creates stories and territories based on global culture, from medieval Germany to the Tokugawa shogunate era in Japan centuries ago.

“At first glance, for me, it was a Japanese game,” said Kazuya Ishida, a 22-year-old university student from Tokyo. He added that he could not find a mobile game of the same genre and quality in Japan at the time.

At the Tokyo Game Show in September, Ishida waited in line for an hour and a half to try out miHoYo’s turn-based RPG “Honkai: Star Rail” for 10 minutes. Its mobile version, launched in April, generated about $500 million in global revenue in its first three months, matching “Genshin Impact’s” initial results of $515 million, according to Sensor Tower. Revenues from the United States and Japan accounted for more than a third of the total.

In October, miHoYo embarked on an eight-country concert tour with local orchestras playing music from “Genshin Impact.” Gaming music concerts are a popular marketing and community development strategy overseas. Tickets for most cities, including Los Angeles and New York, sold out within minutes.

“Genshin Impact,” as well as zombie apocalypse titles “Puzzles & Survival” and “Age of Origins” are recent examples of Chinese titles that imitate foreign aesthetics and gameplay and have become hits overseas.

For decades, Chinese industry has accumulated knowledge through labor-intensive jobs, such as art and design, that global video game companies have outsourced to China. While Western and Japanese studios are traditionally strong in consoles, Chinese companies have developed strengths in mobile gaming, an area that now accounts for half of the video game industry’s global revenues, according to the research firm. Newzoo Game Market studies.

Today, Chinese industry is trying to go beyond imitating foreign successes.

Recently, “Black Myth: Wukong,” a martial arts action role-playing game scheduled for release next year, caused a stir on social media. Rooted in the Chinese epic “Journey to the West” about the pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk and three animal spirits to India, the title features the Monkey King, the protagonist of the tale.

The game was received positively by demo players on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, who said they were impressed by its high-quality art and dark, eerie fiction style.

“You take Chinese mythology and stories like that and you apply Western genres. That’s the way to succeed,” said Seattle-based Mark Long, who runs the studio that produces the shooter “Shrapnel.”

As Chinese games become more popular, issues such as censorship and data security could face scrutiny overseas, similar to what happened with TikTok short videos app. Some global players said they found headlines like “Genshin Impact” censoring politically sensitive terms like “Taiwan” and “Hong Kong” in their chat functions. US security experts have also expressed concern over Beijing’s possible access to data collected during the games. The companies claim that user data is stored locally and its use is limited to commercial purposes.

Toshihiro Nagoshi, former creative director of Sega Japan – part of Sega Sammy Holdings SGAMY – and creator of the mafia series “Yakuza”, left Sega with a team of developers in 2021 and established a studio under NetEase. His studio is developing a console game aimed at gamers around the world, helping NetEase reach gamers on platforms beyond mobile games.

“Gamers are focusing less and less on ‘who made the game and from which country,’ as long as the game is attractive to the market,” Nagoshi said.