China is the only country that leads at both ends of the games trade. In 2025 it generated a record 350.79 billion yuan (about $49.8 billion) in domestic player spending across an all-time high of 683 million paying players (with the total gaming population nearer 722 million) — a market so large it is now neck-and-neck with the United States for the title of biggest on earth (China Game Industry Group Committee; Newzoo). And it exported $20.46 billion of self-developed games overseas in the same year, more than the entire domestic games market of any country except itself and the US (CGIGC). The world’s biggest buyer of games is also its biggest seller. That double dominance is the whole story.
How big is China’s gaming market?
Domestic sales hit 350.79 billion yuan (~$49.8 billion) in 2025, up 7.7%, with the player base reaching a record 683 million (China Game Industry Group Committee). That makes China the largest gaming market in Asia and either the largest or co-largest in the world — Newzoo’s 2025 model puts China narrowly ahead of the United States, by around $200 million, with the two together accounting for roughly half of all global games spending. The clean “second after the US” line that held for a decade no longer quite holds; the two are effectively tied.
This is no longer an explosive-growth story. Niko Partners, measuring total player spending on a different basis, has China rising only modestly to around $54.8 billion by 2029. The market is colossal and maturing — single-digit annual growth on a base so vast that a few percent still moves billions. What’s accelerating isn’t domestic spend. It’s exports.
From cloned consoles to Happy Farm: how China’s market was built
China’s gaming story starts in the grey market. In the late 1980s, import tariffs as high as 130% made legitimate Japanese consoles unaffordable, so reverse-engineered clones filled the gap — by the end of 1993, over 60% of secondary-school students in Beijing owned a games console, almost all of them locally built clones. When home PCs spread after 1995, gaming moved to the internet café: China went from 40,000 cafés in 2000 to more than 110,000 by 2002, and those smoky rooms became the cradle of Chinese online gaming — right as the State Council banned console sales outright in June 2000.
The online decade did the rest. The market grew from $1.7 billion and 42 million players in 2007 to $13.5 billion by 2013, powered by free-to-play MMOs and social games — Happy Farm (2008), the farming game widely credited with inspiring FarmVille, made Wired’s list of the decade’s most influential titles. That 2007–2013 boom is what forged Tencent and NetEase into global giants. Then mobile ate everything: games on phones went from roughly 10% of the market in 2012 to 41% in 2016, past half in 2018, and nearly three-quarters today.
One more piece of the dominance puzzle: China doesn’t just play and make the world’s games, it builds them. By 2019, 96% of all video game consoles were manufactured in China — which is why US tariff threats that year prompted a rare joint petition to Washington from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
China exports more games than most countries’ entire markets
Here’s the number that reframes everything. Chinese self-developed games earned $20.46 billion overseas in 2025, up 10.2% — the sixth straight year above 100 billion yuan (CGIGC). China’s game exports alone are larger than the entire domestic games market of every country on the planet except the United States and China itself, bigger than the whole of Japan’s or South Korea’s home markets. This is the producer side of Asian gaming at its most extreme: the region exports more than half the world’s mobile games, and China is the single largest engine of that flow.
The United States takes about 32% of Chinese mobile-game export revenue, Japan 16% and South Korea 9% (CGIGC). The titles driving it are no longer Chinese hits that happen to travel — they are global franchises that happen to be Chinese. miHoYo’s Genshin Impact passed $10 billion in lifetime player spending by the end of 2025 (third-party estimates; the company is private), and Honkai: Star Rail crossed $2 billion on mobile in under two years. NetEase has pulled the same trick regionally: Knives Out has earned over $2 billion lifetime, around 90% of it in Japan. China doesn’t just make the games it plays. Increasingly, it makes the games everyone else plays too.
China’s real reach is bigger than the export figure
The $20 billion export number understates China’s grip, because much of the West’s biggest games are already Chinese-owned. Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant), a position it began building with a $400 million deal back in 2011, around 28% of Epic Games (Fortnite and the Unreal Engine the industry builds on), and 81.4% of Supercell (Clash of Clans), acquired for $8.6 billion in 2016, plus stakes in Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Discord. NetEase, meanwhile, owns Western studios outright — France’s Quantic Dream, Canada’s SkyBox Labs. When you count the games made by Chinese-owned companies rather than just games exported from China, the footprint is far larger than any single revenue line shows.
That reach is now a geopolitical flashpoint. In 2026 the Trump administration was openly weighing whether to force Tencent to divest its stakes in Epic, Riot and Supercell on national-security grounds. It’s the clearest sign yet that China’s gaming power is read in Washington as strategic, not commercial — and that the export figure is only the visible part of a much deeper hold on how the world plays.
Why mobile dominates — and console is finally stirring
Mobile is 73.3% of China’s domestic revenue (257.08 billion yuan), with PC client games around 22% and console a rounding error (CGIGC). PC is quietly resurgent too: Chinese players now make up 23.6% of Steam’s user base (2024), up from just 0.8% a decade earlier — the largest national cohort on the platform, ahead of the United States. The console share is tiny for a structural reason: consoles were under an outright sales ban in China from 2000 to 2014, and the market never recovered the habit. But the segment is now the fastest-growing in the country, up 86% year on year in 2025 off that small base.
The proof that China can build for the global console and PC market arrived in 2024 with Black Myth: Wukong, from Tencent-backed studio Game Science. It sold 10 million copies in three days and more than 25 million within five months — a genuine AAA landmark from a country whose state effectively banned consoles for fourteen years. It showed Chinese studios can ship a premium, globally competitive title, not just a free-to-play mobile machine. For how the dominant mobile model actually monetises, see our breakdown of how gaming monetisation works in Asia.
Who are the biggest Chinese game companies?
Tencent is the largest games company in the world. Its full-year 2025 games revenue reached 241.6 billion yuan, up 22%, with international games crossing $10 billion for the first time on a 33% jump (Tencent FY2025 results). Honor of Kings remains the world’s highest-grossing mobile game — over $5 billion in 2023 alone, 100-million-plus daily active users, live in 160-plus countries — and newer hits like Delta Force are driving domestic growth. NetEase is the clear number two, with around $3.3 billion in quarterly games revenue and a stable of franchises from Fantasy Westward Journey to Identity V.
Then there’s miHoYo, the privately held studio that turned Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail into a global gacha empire from a standing start, and Game Science, whose single console hit rewrote what the world expects from Chinese studios. The pattern is consistent: a handful of Chinese companies now sit among the most powerful games businesses anywhere, and their reach is global, not domestic.
How does China regulate gaming?
Every game in China needs a state-issued licence — a banhao — to monetise, and that approval tap is the industry’s single biggest variable. After a nine-month freeze on new licences from mid-2021, approvals have not just recovered but hit a multi-year high: 1,771 games approved in 2025, up 25%, the most since 2018 (Niko Partners). The regulatory posture in 2025 is firmly pro-industry. Foreign publishers still cannot operate directly: games must run through wholly Chinese-owned partners, which is why World of Warcraft has been operated first by The9 and then by NetEase.
The tap has been shut twice, and both times the industry convulsed. A 2018 regulator reorganisation froze approvals for months — licences collapsed from roughly 9,600 in 2017 to 1,980 in 2018, and Tencent’s stock lost about 40% of its value, an estimated $230 billion, by that October. The 2021–22 freeze was harsher still: it followed state media branding games “opium for the mind”, and by the time approvals resumed in April 2022, over 14,000 game-related companies had deregistered in China. When the licence tap closes, the world’s biggest games market simply stops onboarding new products.
The control system runs deeper than licensing. China has iterated anti-addiction tech since 2007, when systems began wiping minors’ in-game currency after three hours of continuous play; real-name authentication became mandatory across all games in 2020; minors face monthly top-up caps (200 yuan for ages 8–16, 400 yuan for 16–18); and a 2020 age-labelling scheme tiers games at 8+, 12+ and 16+. Content rules bite as hard as playtime rules: titles judged to smear China or the PLA — Battlefield 4, Command & Conquer: Generals, I.G.I.-2 — are banned outright, and approvals have been withheld from games deemed to project the wrong values or look “more Japanese than Chinese.”
Two harder edges remain. China enforces the strictest youth-gaming limits in the world — under-18s may play just three hours a week, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings only, policed by real-name and facial-recognition systems. And in December 2023, a draft rule proposing caps on in-game spending briefly wiped roughly $80 billion off Tencent and NetEase in a single day — before the regulator quietly deleted the draft three weeks later and the stocks rebounded. The spending caps were never enacted. The episode is a reminder that in China, regulatory risk is the market’s defining feature, even when the rules don’t ultimately land.
China’s esports run at stadium scale
China’s esports market was worth roughly 29.3 billion yuan (~$4.1 billion) in 2025, and the cultural footprint is bigger than the money (CGIGC). The institutional depth goes back decades: Beijing recognised esports as an official sport in 2003, and in 2019 “professional gamer” entered the state’s official occupation registry — by which point roughly 100,000 people were registered as professional gamers, earning around three times the national average salary. The 2017 League of Legends world final in Beijing drew an estimated 106 million viewers, 98% of them inside China — Super Bowl scale, for one match.
The spectacle keeps growing. When Honor of Kings held its 2025 league final at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium, it packed in 62,196 spectators — a Guinness World Record for a single esports event — with tickets gone in twelve seconds (Esports Insider). China topped the esports medal table at its home 2023 Asian Games, taking golds in Dota 2, Arena of Valor and PUBG Mobile.
One honest caveat the hype usually skips: China’s League of Legends teams lost the World Championship final to South Korea’s T1 in both 2023 and 2024. China is the scale leader in esports, but not the undisputed champion. That tension — vast and dominant, yet still chasing Korea at the very top — runs through the whole market. China is the biggest games nation on earth by almost every measure, the biggest exporter, and still, in places, the challenger rather than the king. For the regional picture this sits inside, see the Asia gaming market pillar.
For how the country accesses and uses AI — which models work and which win — see our guide to AI in China.
Frequently asked questions
How big is China’s gaming market?
China’s domestic games market generated 350.79 billion yuan (about $49.8 billion) in 2025, up 7.7%, with a record 683 million players (China Game Industry Group Committee). It is the largest in Asia and either the largest or co-largest in the world, neck-and-neck with the United States.
How much does China export in games?
Chinese self-developed games earned $20.46 billion overseas in 2025, up 10.2% — more than the entire domestic games market of any country except the United States and China itself. The US, Japan and South Korea are the largest export destinations.
What is the biggest Chinese game company?
Tencent, the largest games company in the world, with 241.6 billion yuan in 2025 games revenue (up 22%) and Honor of Kings, the world’s highest-grossing mobile game. NetEase is second, and miHoYo (Genshin Impact) is the breakout global exporter.
Why did China ban games consoles?
In June 2000 the State Council banned console production, import and sale over youth-addiction fears. The ban was eased via the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone in 2014 and fully lifted in July 2015 — but fourteen console-free years are why console remains China’s smallest segment even as it grows fastest.
What are China’s youth gaming restrictions?
The world’s strictest. Since 2021, players under 18 may game only three hours a week — Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings — enforced through real-name registration and facial recognition, with monthly spending caps of 200–400 yuan for minors.
How many games does China approve each year?
1,771 in 2025, up 25% and the most since 2018 (Niko Partners). The range has swung wildly: roughly 9,600 approvals in 2017 collapsed to about 1,980 during the 2018 freeze, and the 2021–22 freeze saw over 14,000 game-related companies deregister before approvals resumed.
Can China make AAA console games?
Yes, as Black Myth: Wukong proved in 2024 — selling 10 million copies in three days and 25 million-plus within five months. It is a landmark for a country that banned console sales from 2000 to 2014; console is now China’s fastest-growing segment, up 86% in 2025.
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