Agenda
Your Game Is Never Niche in China
Tsz Wai Lam (Partner and Publishing Producer, Full Metal Bagel Games)
Bing Zhe Li (Founder, GameDash, GameDash)
Pass Type:
Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up Pass -
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Track:
Independent Development, Marketing
Audience Level:
Intermediate
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
China accounts for roughly a third of Steam's active user base. During Chinese New Year 2025, Simplified Chinese briefly crossed 50% of Steam's language share. At that scale, 0.1% of Chinese Steam users is 42,000 players.
The question is almost never whether an audience exists in China. The question is whether a game is being positioned to reach them.
This session draws on three shipped campaigns to examine how Chinese player communities actually organize, and why genre-first thinking tends to produce the wrong answers. Cairn (The Game Bakers) found its largest organic coverage not through indie game channels but through mountaineering content creators and narrative essay videos, reaching 997,000 views on a single post 50 days after launch. Manor Lords had global #1 wishlist status and still needed explicit trust-building before Chinese players converted from awareness to purchase. Everything is Crab discovered its most effective positioning frame not from the campaign team but from players themselves, who began describing it as a Spore successor within the first week.
Each case illustrates a different challenge in how Western developers typically approach China, and a concrete alternative. The session is intended to be useful for indie developers and publishers who are new to the market and working without a dedicated China team.
The question is almost never whether an audience exists in China. The question is whether a game is being positioned to reach them.
This session draws on three shipped campaigns to examine how Chinese player communities actually organize, and why genre-first thinking tends to produce the wrong answers. Cairn (The Game Bakers) found its largest organic coverage not through indie game channels but through mountaineering content creators and narrative essay videos, reaching 997,000 views on a single post 50 days after launch. Manor Lords had global #1 wishlist status and still needed explicit trust-building before Chinese players converted from awareness to purchase. Everything is Crab discovered its most effective positioning frame not from the campaign team but from players themselves, who began describing it as a Spore successor within the first week.
Each case illustrates a different challenge in how Western developers typically approach China, and a concrete alternative. The session is intended to be useful for indie developers and publishers who are new to the market and working without a dedicated China team.
Takeaway
1. Genre tags are a search tool, not an audience map. Chinese player communities organize around emotional experience and cultural resonance. Identifying who is already organized around what a game feels like is more useful than identifying the genre community.
2. Awareness does not automatically convert to purchase. When a genre has no cultural anchor in China, trust-building is the campaign. Trust signals that feel personal outperform trust signals that feel like marketing.
3. The most effective positioning frame sometimes comes from the players themselves. Watching what Chinese players say in the first 48 hours of a festival window can surface audience frames that no pre-campaign analysis would have found.
2. Awareness does not automatically convert to purchase. When a genre has no cultural anchor in China, trust-building is the campaign. Trust signals that feel personal outperform trust signals that feel like marketing.
3. The most effective positioning frame sometimes comes from the players themselves. Watching what Chinese players say in the first 48 hours of a festival window can surface audience frames that no pre-campaign analysis would have found.
Intended Audience
Indie developers and publishers who are new to the China market, or who have launched in China without dedicated China support and want to understand what drove or limited their results.