Domestic game creators step up charm offensive in overseas markets

GUANGZHOU - Before an audience of gamers from across the globe, Chinese game heavyweight TiMi Studio Group kicked off a charm offensive to pitch its open-world role-playing game (RPG), Honor of Kings: World, at the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco last month.

Accompanied by groovy Chinese rap songs, attendees witnessed the game's debut, catching a glimpse of the rich Eastern cultural elements and epic narrative featured in the latest creation of TiMi, a subsidiary of China's internet behemoth Tencent.

Buoyed by the international success of China's first 3A video game "Black Myth: Wukong," domestic game developers have further ramped up the global push of their productions, adding a Chinese twist to the worldwide game industry.

During Apple CEO Tim Cook's China tour in March, he joined a play-test event for Wuthering Waves, an open-world RPG launched by Chinese unicorn enterprise Kuro Games. Impressed by the game's unique visuals, character motions and designs, Cook praised the company on his Chinese Weibo account, highlighting the "incredibly immersive experiences" it offers.

Since its launch last year, Wuthering Waves has shown solid performance in both domestic and international markets. So far, the game's global download volume has exceeded 50 million, claiming spots on the best-selling charts in many countries and regions including Singapore, the Republic of Korea, and the Philippines.

According to Kuro Games, its fruitful global strategy is an outcome driven by cutting-edge technologies while inspired by rich Chinese culture. So far, the company has been collaborating with multiple hardware and chip manufacturers to provide gamers with high-quality experience.

As observers have pointed out, it is no coincidence that both Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent and Guangzhou-headquartered Kuro Games thrived in South China's Guangdong province, an established manufacturing powerhouse that is now gaining international prestige for its internet technologies.

Thanks to a sophisticated industrial chain and digital infrastructure for game development in the province, Guangdong's game industry, which already accounts for nearly 80 percent of China's total market share, has achieved a total revenue of over 188.6 billion yuan ($26 billion) overseas over the past five years.

To help game enterprises make inroad in overseas markets, Guangdong has streamlined the process of review, approval and operation for new games, especially in industrial hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, putting them on a fast track to go global.

To fully tap into the technological wave of artificial intelligence, Guangdong has also announced ground-breaking measures to boost the integration of games with new scenarios such as smart vehicles and AI-powered glasses.

Guangdong's global push of homegrown games epitomizes the rise of China's game industry overseas despite a sluggish growth and heightened competition in world's game sector.

In the past five years, the total revenue of Chinese game developers in foreign markets has increased steadily above the 100 billion Chinese yuan threshold annually, with a record high of $18.5 billion in 2024, up 13.39 year-on-year.

Citing an industrial report, Zheng Nan, a senior member of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association, said that by 2027, the overseas revenue of Chinese games will increase to approximately $39 billion, with a wider application of AI in game production, operation, and customer service.

The rosy prospects are further underpinned by China's unrelenting pursuit of high-standard opening-up. Recently, the State Council has approved a work plan to accelerate the launch of comprehensive opening-up programs in the service sector on a trial basis.

While prioritizing the opening-up of telecommunications services and digital industries, the work plan outlines efforts to boost the global push for homegrown games and to construct a complete industrial chain covering creation, game production, distribution, and overseas operation.