How China came to dominate mobile games – and how Western companies can compete | Opinion

Tanja Loktionova is the founder of Values Value and co-founder of InGame Job.

Chinese companies now dominate the global top-grossing mobile charts. In February 2026, according to AppMagic, seven of the top 15 grossing mobile games globally were Chinese-owned titles, generating a combined $668 million from in-app purchase revenue in a single month.

Western publishers are still competing at the top: Playrix, King, Roblox Corporation and Supercell all feature in AppMagic‘s list of top 10 grossing mobile publishers worldwide. But their success is based on legacy titles. In 2025, not a single new launch in the top 15 by revenue in Tier-1 Western markets came from a Western studio.

Chinese games earned $20.5 billion in overseas markets in 2025 – a tenth consecutive year of growth, and the second consecutive year of double-digit expansion. This didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen simply because China is big. China’s global dominance was built in sequence.

Rise to dominance

It began in the early 2000s, when escalating PC piracy in China made the buy-to-play model a financial dead end and forced local developers to focus on free-to-play. By the time the rest of the world shifted to mobile, China already had a ten-year head start in understanding paying user psychology, a lead that still shapes their approach to live-ops today.

On mobile, Chinese studios first dominated their own domestic market, which in 2025 consisted of 772 million active gamers and was worth approximately $50.1 billion, with mobile accounting for 73.29% of all revenue, according to China Daily. The competitive pressure was intense, the monetisation sophistication ran deep, and the organisational systems that emerged were forged under conditions Western studios have never had to face. As Tom van Dam, who has worked at both NetEase and ByteDance, put it in an interview with Pocket Gamer: “The China market is like bootcamp for how to be a winning global player.”

From that base, Chinese companies began moving outward. The first beachhead was strategy, particularly 4X strategy games. Titles like Rise of Kingdoms and Game of Empires built massive international audiences, driven by monetisation architecture and live-ops discipline that Western competitors first underestimated and then could not match at scale. In 2025, among the top 100 Chinese-made mobile games by overseas revenue, nearly half were strategy titles, according to a report from Meridian Play.

Mid-core followed. And now casual and hybrid-casual titles like puzzle, merge, and match games – genres that Western companies considered their own – are increasingly being eaten into by Chinese developers, too.

“Western companies cannot sustainably scale teams into the thousands, hire and restructure at industrial speed, or maintain velocity through workforce depth”

Chinese companies operate with structural advantages that Western companies do not have: massive, geographically concentrated talent pools; cultural acceptance of shift-based work, including multi-shift live-ops; high workforce discipline and replaceability; lower unit labour costs at scale; and organisational tolerance for very large teams and rapid restructuring.

Western companies cannot sustainably operate multiple live-ops shifts, scale teams into the thousands, hire and restructure at industrial speed, or maintain velocity through workforce depth. Competing on this axis would be strategically naïve.

The value of teams

Chinese talent does not need to leave China. The domestic market is large enough, career progression exists internally, and language and cultural barriers limit outward mobility. As a result, talent circulates primarily within China, knowledge remains internal, and competitive advantage compounds instead of leaking.

Accessing this talent from the outside is difficult. In practice, it requires acquisitions, equity arrangements, or full studio buyouts. Individual extraction rarely works. The capability is embedded in systems, not individuals.

“Chinese acquirers are buying functioning organisational units, because they have learned, through hard experience, that capability lives in teams”

At least some major Chinese companies have been attempting to relocate Western and Eastern European studios lock, stock, and barrel to China. One founder who received and declined an acquisition offer – speaking anonymously due to ongoing industry relationships – confirmed to me that the terms of the deal included a commitment to relocating the entire team. Skilled artists and UI/UX designers were explicitly part of the value being acquired. Full relocation costs were covered, along with complete legal support for families: visas, work permits, schools, kindergartens. Without that commitment to relocate, there was no deal. Chinese acquirers are buying functioning organisational units, because they have learned, through hard experience, that capability lives in teams.

Cultural translation

One of the most important strategic moves Chinese companies made was recognising where cultural mismatch actually mattered: disciplines like art direction, UI, and visual language. Let me share a prominent example.

In 2017, Skymoons, a Chengdu-headquartered mobile games developer, made a deliberate move into Western markets that illustrates exactly this logic. The company opened an art studio in Kyiv, Ukraine, and established a separate art division in Edinburgh, Scotland, later the same year. Values Value was directly involved in building the Kyiv operation, placing the head of studio, consulting on office set up, and helping with some key hires for the team.

Kyiv and Edinburgh were not chosen because they were cheap: The salaries were obviously higher than in China. They were chosen because they gave Skymoons access to Western visual intuition, filtering assumptions about UI density, colour logic, and character readability into formats that Chinese production pipelines could absorb and deploy at scale. The goal went beyond outsourcing to culturalisation.

In July 2018, iQIYI, the Baidu-backed entertainment platform, acquired Skymoons for $190 million, with the deal potentially rising to $300 million on performance milestones. Jason Chiu, who served as senior director of corporate development at Skymoons at the time, confirmed directly that the Kyiv and Edinburgh operations contributed considerable value to the acquisition. “There would have been many more cases like this,” he told me, referring to a Kyiv office set up by a Chinese game company, “if it weren’t interrupted by the war.”

China built a learning system

Beyond acquisitions and studio building, Chinese companies deployed a quieter but highly effective strategy: a distributed expertise-acquisition network.

In practice, this meant systematic outreach framed as consulting or advisory work, targeting Western specialists. According to the signals Values Value was getting from the talents, they were being offered $300 to $1,000 per hour for such consulting work.

The kind of people Chinese companies were targeting is revealing: level designers, game designers, product owners, game economy and balance designers, and monetisation designers. Add art directors and principals to the picture, and you get an idea of the most-wanted list.

It’s notable that art directors and principals were sought after rather than line artists. Line artists execute visual decisions, whereas art directors make them. By relocating art directors specifically, Chinese companies were internalising Western visual decision-making: the strategic layer of taste, not the operational output.

The absorption extended beyond mobile game specialists. The same relocated game designer mentioned above recalls regular joint working sessions with invited external experts. Art directors with backgrounds at major entertainment companies – including streaming platforms and animation studios – served in supervising roles as embedded creative producers.

Combined with the monetisation and systems roles, it’s clear that Chinese companies have been extracting the capabilities that sit at the intersection of player psychology, progression design, and cultural intuition – the things that are hardest to reverse-engineer from the outside.

This was not about copying successful games, it was about owning the thinking behind them. Knowledge was sampled, decomposed, and internalised without long-term hiring commitments, cultural integration risk, or dependency on individuals.

The final frontier: Casual and hybrid-casual

Casual and hybrid-casual games are often misunderstood as being “simple,” but operationally, they are highly demanding products. Yet the kind of large-scale, high-throughput operation they require exactly suits the organisational structure that Chinese companies have spent a decade building.

The average number of live-ops events per mobile game per month reached 89 in 2025, with a continuing upward trend, according to AppMagic. As global downloads decline and new user acquisition (UA) becomes more expensive, the retention and reactivation of existing players has become the base operating model. Live-ops has become critical.

“Chinese publishers now account for an astonishing 35% of all global mobile UA spend – up 22% year-on-year”

Chinese publishers now account for an astonishing 35% of all global mobile UA spend – up 22% year-on-year, according to AppsFlyer’s State of Gaming for Marketers. And Chinese publishers’ market share gains in 2025 were concentrated precisely in the Tier-1 Western markets that matter most: up 15% in the United States, 26% in the United Kingdom, 31% in Germany, and 34% in France.

This latest move into the casual and hybrid-casual market is deliberate – Chinese companies have spent years quietly building the foundation needed to tackle this Western-dominated market through acquiring and building studios, relocating employees to China, and tapping into advisory networks.

The strategic reality for Western companies

On top of all this comes AI, which is being enthusiastically embraced by Chinese studios. Speaking on the Two and a Half Gamers podcast in October 2025, Chen Yang (Iwae), ecosystem operations lead at Cocos, said that according to his survey, more than 80% of Chinese developers are using AI already across art, code, operations, and UA pipelines. A single team can now build a minimum viable product in two weeks, he said: “One artist, one programmer, one Midjourney, one GPT, and one agent for the game plan. Which means three people are replaced by three agents.”

“‘Sometimes we find a really good meme from TikTok, and the next day there are games with this kind of meme in their level'”

The speed of creation is phenomenal. “Sometimes we find a really good meme from TikTok,” said Iwae, “and you can see the next day there are games with this kind of meme in their level already.”

Studios that already had the organisational discipline, the live-ops infrastructure, and the culturalised art direction are now applying AI on top of it all, compressing costs, accelerating iteration, and scaling content in ways that have no Western equivalent at the same price point.

The only viable response for Western companies is talent density: fewer people, with higher leverage per person.

Hiring should be treated as a board-level decision, with performance and retention managed as systems. Process sophistication should be deliberately built to replace what cannot be achieved through workforce scale.

The focus should be on building unique games that AI multiplication cannot replicate: ideas, judgment, taste, and the kind of creative decision-making that comes from individuals with genuine cultural authority, not systems optimized for speed.

Chinese companies win through organisational scale. Western companies can only win through organisational and creative precision.

“We may be observing the last generation of Western mobile game winners to rely on scale instead of talent density.”

The Western companies at the top of today’s charts earned their positions. But very few of the companies coming up underneath them are from the West.

We may be observing the last generation of Western mobile game winners to rely on scale instead of talent density.

The next generation of mobile games to emerge from the West will be built by companies that can do more with fewer people, that can make decisions more quickly, and that can amplify individuals instead of absorbing them into systems.

Chinese companies have patiently and systematically built a vast and efficient system for churning out successful mobile games, first dominating their domestic market, then targeting strategy, then mid-core, and now reaching casual and hybrid-casual. At the same time, AI is compressing development timelines further, while Chinese firms are throwing vast sums of money at acquiring players.

Western companies cannot hope to compete on the same battlefield – the only scenario in which they can win is by building something genuinely different.