The Uptake | Game on

“Made in China” used to come with baggage. For decades, the label was often associated with inexpensive goods of inconsistent quality—a reputation shaped in part by China’s emergence as a major export manufacturing base. Cheap was the operative word. Quality, less reliably so.

How different things look a few decades later.

From fashion and coffee to electronics, artificial intelligence models, and chips, the list of industries where Chinese origin can still be casually treated as shorthand for inferior quality is shrinking. Games may be next.

Consider Love and Deepspace. Since its release in 2024, the romance game by Papergames has become one of China’s most prominent otome titles.

Then there is Mihoyo, better known internationally as Hoyoverse. Genshin Impact turned the Shanghai-based developer into a global name, followed by titles from its Honkai series.

And then came Black Myth: Wukong.

Developed by Game Science and inspired by the Chinese classic “Journey to the West,” it sold more than 30 million copies within its first year. Its success made it a milestone of sorts for China’s game industry: here was a Chinese-developed, premium single-player title drawing global attention while placing Chinese mythology, architecture, and aesthetics squarely at its center.

Then, Gamescom 2026 offered a glimpse of how much wider the field is becoming. By one count, 14 of the more than 50 games featured during Opening Night Live were developed or published by Chinese companies—the highest number in the event’s history.

They did not all come from the usual suspects: Tencent, NetEase, and Mihoyo. Smaller and midsize developers were there too. Nekcom Games brought Showa American Story, perhaps one of the stranger examples of what this new generation of Chinese developers is willing to attempt. The game imagines an alternate version of the US colonized by Japan, then drops its teenage protagonist into that dystopian cultural mashup.

Subtle, it is not. But that may be precisely the point.

What is intriguing today is no longer whether China can make games as technically accomplished as those produced by more established gaming industries. There is mounting evidence that it can.

More interesting is the bravado.

Industrial maturity is easy to recognize in polish: better graphics, bigger budgets, more sophisticated production, and fewer technical compromises. Creative confidence is harder to measure. It shows up when developers become willing to take risks.

That increasingly seems to be happening. Chinese studios are now interpreting familiar genres on their own terms, drawing more deeply on Chinese culture, and pursuing less conventional ideas.

This is not to say borrowing has disappeared. Games, like most creative industries, have always evolved through imitation, adaptation, and recombination. But a wider field of Chinese developers is now warming to the idea of venturing beyond safe formulas and testing whether more experimental ideas can find an audience.

For gamers, the immediate consequence is straightforward: more games, from more developers, attempting more things.

For China, the significance is broader. The old “Made in China” stereotype was never going to survive unchanged as the country moved up the value chain. What games add to that story is something manufacturing prowess alone cannot: cultural authorship.

Making a good product is one thing. Making something recognizably your own, and believing the rest of the world might want it, is another.

Geopolitics, regulation, commercial realities, and cultural differences will continue to impose limits. The world is not quite China’s oyster.

But judging by what its game developers are cooking up, China appears increasingly willing to order from the whole menu.