Digital Dragons 2026 - Huqiao Games tells us how the Chinese industry is changing

The video game market in China is undergoing an unprecedented metamorphosis. For years considered a self-contained ecosystem, almost totally dominated by the mobile world, free-to-play games, and PC Cafés, today the Asian giant is extending its reach towards the global premium market, as demonstrated by the sensational impact of AAA productions such as Black Myth: Wukong.

To understand what is happening behind the scenes of this revolution and what the real opportunities (and barriers) are for Western developers, we had a chat at Digital Dragons with Aleksander Ptak, Account Manager at Huqiao Games.

A bridge between two worlds: the Huqiao Games experience

Q: Hi Aleksander! Domenico from Gamesurf. You represent Huqiao Games, did I pronounce the name correctly?

Aleksander Ptak: Hi! Yes, it's pronounced "Huqiao", which literally means "The Amber Bridge". To give you some context, we started as a Polish company focused on bringing Polish businesses and companies into the Chinese market. Over time, however, we decided to focus exclusively on the development and video game industry side. We started with Polish teams and then, as we grew, we formed collaborations with increasingly larger studios and publishers across the West. We currently work with about 40 publishers and studios. The company itself then officially moved from Poland to Hong Kong, China, where our entire operational division is now located. I am one of the very few team members who physically remained in Europe!

Q: Detached and left behind in the old continent! 

Aleksander Ptak: Left behind, exactly! But it's actually part of our strategy. The vast majority of our clients work with Western hours, so it's much more convenient for them to synchronize with me on various activities. Europe is in a perfect position, exactly halfway between the United States and China. For managing operations and ensuring all marketing strategies are aligned, my position is ideal.

The giant's numbers: 700 million players and PC-Steam dominance

Q: Your positioning straddling two continents is the perfect hook for my next question. In Europe and generally in the Western market, it is often said that China is literally "devouring" the video game industry, both in terms of player volume and quantity of titles produced. Having a privileged view of the situation, what should we expect from the Chinese market in the future?

Aleksander Ptak: To understand where we are going, we need to understand that the history of gaming in China has been radically different from that in the West. The era of the first historic consoles, I'm thinking of Atari or Game Boy, almost completely skipped China. There, video games are a relatively new phenomenon and are growing very rapidly. Precisely because of this history, market realities are different: today we are talking about approximately 700 million active players. That's a monstrous number, meaning almost half of the entire Chinese population plays video games.

Q: And I imagine a gigantic slice is in the hands of mobile.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly, and that's a crucial point. Mobile alone accounts for about 80% of the total player share. The remaining 15-20% is usually categorized under "other". This "other" includes PC, consoles, and VR. But the reality is that the vast majority of this niche is made up of PC users. The console market itself is incredibly small; if we look at PlayStation's market share in China, it's tiny. It's not easy ground for them, and it's a problem primarily related to the cost of hardware, which is extremely expensive in China, and the complications in game distribution, especially digital titles.

It's a complex time for consoles, but things are changing. We see that PlayStation is setting up increasingly larger booths at Chinese fairs, they are becoming very active and are entering the market strongly. In a few years, we might see a change, but today China is still a market polarized on mobile and PC. But be careful: that 15-20% of Chinese PC players is equivalent to about 40% of Steam's entire global user base!

Q: Forty percent? That's a huge figure.

Aleksander Ptak: If we look at current data, about 40% of Steam users use simplified Chinese as their default language on a daily basis. Of course, we're not just talking about residents in China, because there are communities in Malaysia, Japan, Korea, and even the United States that use simplified Chinese to navigate Steam, but it remains the largest linguistic group on the platform by far. It surpasses English and Spanish. It's an immense and continuously expanding pool.

Government push and the "Gamescom of Asia"

Q: Does this industry growth go hand in hand with the growth of titles? It almost seems that a few years ago, overnight, we started seeing more and more Chinese productions on the Western market.

Aleksander Ptak: On the internal production front, increasingly larger Chinese games are being released, with colossal budgets, capable of generating enormous traffic and garnering great appreciation from Western players as well. Think of titles like Black Myth: Wukong, or Where Winds Meet... Practically every month there's a big launch or an important new release coming from China. Furthermore, the Chinese government itself is investing heavily in these studios; there are many more funds and investors are extremely open to financing game development. They are opening huge gaming startup accelerators in cities like Chengdu, creating studio associations, networks, and hubs to help them grow. Even industry events in China record staggering numbers every year: fairs like ChinaJoy or Bilibili World, which are the benchmarks of the summer season, are effectively becoming the "Gamescom of Asia" in terms of size. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of visitors, major global brands, and many independent Western studios that decide to travel there to showcase their products. And that's exactly the kind of activity we deal with.

Q: It's becoming a two-way process: it's not just China entering foreign markets, but Chinese events themselves attracting the West.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly, it's a pull and push movement. China attracts Western publishers and studios thanks to the economic potential of its user base. At the same time, Chinese giants are investing heavily abroad. Tencent, for example, is acquiring stakes or investing in many Western companies; if we look only at Poland, giants like Techland or Bloober Team have received Chinese investments. The same happened with Funcom, which is partially owned by Tencent. The trend is clear: China is moving beyond its geographical borders. Video games are becoming their new form of soft power and pop culture. In the past, we experienced the great cultural waves that came from Japan and Korea; now China wants to share its creative power, its stories, and its way of developing, which is very different from the Western one. At the current pace, we will see more and more Chinese video game releases capable of bringing innovative mechanics, new experiences, and untold stories to the market. Not to mention all the imagery related to Chinese mythology, which is simply extraordinary and still very little known outside their borders. If the industry starts building great games around these legends, the impact will be enormous.

The bureaucratic bottleneck: how the licensing system (Bànhào) works

Q: Earlier you touched on an interesting point: once "China" in gaming was synonymous only with mobile gacha and free-to-play games, while today we see true AAA blockbusters flourishing on PC and consoles, even though we know that the internal console market in China is tiny. Does this mean that large Chinese AAAs are developed primarily with the Western audience in mind? How did this transformation come about?

Aleksander Ptak: There's an important discussion to be had regarding distribution channels, and it's a fundamental topic. I previously mentioned the issue of regulatory licenses: in China, there is the so-called Bànhào, which is the mandatory government license that a video game must obtain to be legally distributed on local platforms. The reality is that the vast majority of Western and international AAA games will never obtain this license. To get it, the government often requires structural and profound changes to the game, content must be adapted to local guidelines, it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and in some cases, even sharing the game's source code is requested. It's a huge bureaucratic and economic step to take.

There have been historical cases of very big games that managed to obtain these licenses, such as World of Warcraft, which had to undergo heavy modifications around 2010 to comply with government requests. If we look at more recent and famous cases, there's Diablo, which obtained the license in June of last year. It's a rather extreme case, because we all know that Diablo is not exactly a "family-friendly" game, so the team had to make an enormous amount of censorship and internal adjustments to get the green light. Another recent example is Ark Raiders, which obtained the license last April, very recently.

To give you some figures on the complexity of the situation: each month the Chinese government releases a total of about 120-130 publishing licenses. Of these, usually only about ten are for PC titles, and within that ten, only two or three are for games from abroad. All the rest go to local or mobile productions.

Q: So what we officially see on the Chinese market is just the tip of the iceberg.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly. Very few games get the official license to be distributed in China and appear on local stores like Steam China, WeGame or similar platforms. And here we come to the crucial point: how do Chinese players play everything else? The only way fans in China have to buy and play Western premium titles or big AAAs is through the Global version of Steam.

The gray area of the market: "Game Accelerator" and pricing dynamics

Q: So they use the international store that we also use.

Aleksander Ptak: Yes, but it's not that simple. The connection to global Steam from China is not stable due to government filters. To play and download games, Chinese players must use so-called "game accelerators". Note, I'm not talking about VPNs: VPNs in China are illegal, cannot be used freely, and are not suitable for gaming anyway. If you've ever tried to play multiplayer or download a heavy file via VPN, you'll know the experience is terrible. Game accelerators, on the other hand, are absolutely legal and authorized commercial applications in China. The most famous and widely used is called NetEase UU and is developed by the giant NetEase itself.

Q: NetEase, the gigantic Chinese tech company.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly, them. It's a commercial service in plain sight and totally legal. Players activate it and the app optimizes and stabilizes the connection by routing it directly to Steam's servers. It doesn't allow you to browse YouTube or other blocked sites; it's software focused exclusively on connection stability with gaming platforms, in this case global Steam. This way, Chinese players can access, buy, and download games.

But for AAA games, there's another big obstacle in the Chinese market, and that's the price. Premium games costing 60 or 70 dollars are considered extremely expensive for the average local market. And this is the main reason why indie games, simulators, or so-called "bullet-heaven" games (games in the vein of Vampire Survivors) are incredibly successful in China. Many of the titles in this genre that we work with record 40% or even 50% of their total global sales from the Chinese market alone!

Q: Even half of the total sales?

Aleksander Ptak: Yes, precisely because of the ratio between price and the quantity of content offered. We're talking about games that usually cost between 10 and 15 dollars. If we think of titles like Brotato or even Vampire Survivors, the price drops to 5 dollars. For the Chinese audience, such a price is perfect. The premium market in China operates on volume: it's a market focused on the number of units sold, rather than the price of a single tag. If you sell at full Western prices, the conversion between the Yuan and the Dollar, combined with local taxes, drastically reduces your profit margins and it's hard to sell.

At the same time, however, Chinese publishers are moving and pushing for more and more games to obtain official licenses to be on local platforms. I think the situation will change in the future, because Chinese publishers desperately want to have more quality games on their domestic stores. They know very well that they will never attract new users to Chinese platforms if they don't offer better games.

Q: That makes perfect sense. If you want players, you have to give them the best games where they are.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly. If today in China you want to play a title like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you absolutely have to go to global Steam. You will never find that game within the regulated Chinese version. But if in the future these exceptional titles start to be natively available on local platforms, Chinese players will stop using global Steam, which remains an unstable experience tied to accelerators, to take refuge in their own domestic stores.

Q: When you talk about local platforms, do you mean that new entirely Chinese stores are emerging, or are you talking about the growth of existing stores besides Steam?

Aleksander Ptak: I'm talking about the evolution of what's already there. In China, global Steam lives in a kind of "gray area," but it's still accessible. Other Western platforms like the Epic Games Store, the EA app, or GOG itself are not accessible. In China, the main reference store is Steam China, which was born from an official and direct collaboration between Valve and the Chinese publisher Perfect World. Other entities like WeGame (by Tencent) exist, but they are not comparable in size. Steam China is the place you absolutely must be if you want to sell legally in China. The problem is that currently, precisely because of the bottleneck of government licenses, only a few hundred games are available on Steam China.

Q: Very few compared to the global catalog.

Aleksander Ptak: Exactly, if you think that global Steam has hundreds of thousands of titles! Of course, not all of them are played or sell, but the truth is that if a Chinese user wants to play the best titles of the moment, they have to connect to global Steam. Fortunately, they can still do so.

The "Cool China" phenomenon and digital Soft Power

Q: Let's go back for a second to the concept of soft power you mentioned earlier, that is, the idea that video games are becoming a tool for China to make itself known in Europe and the West. Often the word soft power evokes gloomy geopolitical dynamics in people's minds, but in reality, it is also an extraordinary tool to allow us Westerners to discover a fascinating culture. Ten years ago, if you talked about "Journey to the West" to a gamer, at most they would reply that it was the basis on which Akira Toriyama built Dragon Ball. Today, thanks to the planetary success of Wukong, everyone knows exactly what it is. How is all this helping the West to look at Chinese culture and video games in a new light?

Aleksander Ptak: There's a huge and growing global interest not only in the Chinese gaming industry but in their culture in general. There's even a term coined specifically to define this phenomenon: they call it "Cool China". And it's not just about video games; so many things are happening simultaneously. Just think about the streaming world: just look at hugely popular creators like IShowSpeed who organize trips to China and show the country live to millions of viewers in the United States or Europe, showing how beautiful, modern, and interesting a place it is. All this creates curiosity, pushes people to travel, to visit China, but also to open businesses there and look for local partners.

In terms of market potential and size, China today offers astounding business opportunities in terms of production capacity, industrial partners, technological know-how, and investments. It's a world of resources that has so far remained almost completely disconnected from the United States and Europe. Western developers and entrepreneurs need to go there physically, analyze that market, and understand how China is growing. Even a short trip to Shanghai would suffice: once there, you realize how things work and experience a reality completely different from what we are used to in our European or American cities. In terms of technology, culture, and social approach, there is impressive cohesion; everyone is rowing towards the exact same goal.

In all of this, gaming is the spearhead of this soft power. The concept of "Cool China" involves telling traditional Chinese stories through the interactivity of video games. Another fundamental vector they are investing heavily in is VR.

VR in China is not yet a mass market for home entertainment, but Chinese companies are investing enormous sums to transform virtual reality into a true "tourist and cultural experience" for players. They are developing VR games and applications that allow users to explore China's most famous historical sites in an ultra-realistic way or to experience Chinese mythological tales firsthand. They want to use technology as an educational and promotional tool to teach their history to the world and change the global market's perception. Many people still have prejudices or outdated ideas about how China works; gaming and technology are becoming the perfect bridge to connect the daily life and business of the West with the reality of the Asian giant.

How Huqiao Games supports Western developers

Q: It's a truly fascinating scenario. To conclude our chat, let's talk about you: what is Huqiao Games working on right now?

Aleksander Ptak: As I mentioned earlier when talking about our history, today we primarily operate as a publishing support company. In China, the word "publishing" is a very complex term due to legislation: most Chinese publishers are not actually true publishers in the Western sense of the term, because they do not have the power to legally issue the publishing license, which remains an exclusive right in the hands of the NPPA (the government body responsible).

We operate with an agency model focused on publishing and promotion support. We currently manage and continuously support about 40 international development studios. We take care of curating and bringing titles such as Factorio, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, Osiris: New Dawn, or Toplitz Productions' titles like Medieval Dynasty to China. We recently started a major collaboration with Atari for the management of the RollerCoaster Tycoon series. We have many different cases in our portfolio, including some very large AAA projects that are currently protected by non-disclosure agreements.

The trend we see is that more and more Western studios want to be active and visible in China. Our main job is to create and manage their official communication channels from scratch on Chinese social platforms, such as Bilibili or RedNote (the Chinese equivalent of Instagram). We manage the direct line between the Western development studio and the Chinese gaming community: when there's news or an update, we ensure it receives the right media coverage, contact local influencers to have them record dedicated videos, and keep the Chinese industry press informed. When there are major fairs, we physically go there, setting up and managing stands for the Western games in our portfolio. For the upcoming ChinaJoy, for example, we will be managing six stands simultaneously! It's a colossal amount of work and organization, but our ultimate goal remains the same: to build a solid bridge between the Western market and the Chinese video game universe, and in the future, to do the same in reverse, helping excellent Chinese developers land in the West. If a studio wants to approach the Chinese market, we are definitely the point of reference.

Q: And ChinaJoy seems to be exactly the right place to start.

Aleksander Ptak: Absolutely. ChinaJoy is by far the best opportunity available today if you really want to understand this market. Not just for doing business and making contacts, but for seeing gaming in its purest and most massive form with your own eyes. It is effectively the Gamescom of Asia in terms of traffic volume, stand sizes, stages, and structures. It's an event organized completely differently from European fairs. Visiting it even once is an experience that leaves its mark and instantly makes you understand why China is such a disruptive, vital, and unstoppable market.

Q: That's fantastic. I've often seen images of ChinaJoy on websites, but visiting it in person must be a completely different experience. Aleksander, thank you so much for your time and for this splendid overview, it was a real pleasure!

Aleksander Ptak: Thank you, Domenico, the pleasure was mine!