ChinaJoy 2026 closed in Shanghai on August 3. 21CBH’s CJ coverage put visits at 438,900, up 6.97%—a record. Professional attendees topped 44,000, about 21% from overseas. On the show floor, service vendors matched flagship booths; outside the venue, nearly every café in Kerry Parkside hosted a roadshow.

A Beijing mid-size studio BD lead put it plainly: overseas feels more cutthroat this year—fall behind on product and tooling, and you drop off the map.

The fight is not foot traffic. It is time on one screen. The Game Publishing Committee report for H1 2026 puts self-developed overseas revenue at USD 12.372 billion, up 30.22% year on year—growth on paper, anxiety in the booth.

The red ocean includes short video and micro-dramas

The 2026 conversation is blunt: even niches saturate fast, so teams refocus on the US, Europe, Japan, and Korea—higher ARPU, higher bar.

Pressure	Public signal	What it means
Supply	AI lowers dev cost	More clones in every lane
Charts	New titles ~5% of overseas TOP200 revenue (2020–2025)	Head lists freeze
Demand	US mobile +2.2% (2025); Japan down three years	Mature ≠ easy
Attention	Short video, micro-dramas, instant social	Rivals live outside the store

Gamma Data’s competitiveness report shows new products stuck around 5% of overseas TOP200 revenue for years. Feishu Shennu VP Ren Peiyu told 21st Century Business Herald that Chinese teams can turn a “blue ocean” red within six months of discovery—few obvious niches remain.

Executives on the floor say the core stress is no longer genre rivals alone. It is winning minutes against short video, micro-dramas, and lightweight social apps. Century Huatong president Xie Fei makes the same call: attention bleed forces low-friction, easy-onboarding design.

Light casual hits still lean on paid UA. With the global traffic pool barely growing, creative pull and ROI discipline move to center stage. Liftoff CRO Scott Silverman sees Chinese marketers shifting from “installs and rank” to strategic, quantified acquisition.

AppsFlyer’s 2026 game marketing report sketches UA inflation:

• Global game UA spend ~USD 25B in 2025, +3.8%
• Chinese outbound teams: 35% of spend, +22%
• Top spenders (>USD 4M/quarter) now ship 2,400–2,600 creatives per quarter, +25–30%
• AI floods channels with variants—winners keep test velocity, not one lucky ad

You can beat a rival SLG and still lose to a 15-second vertical clip.

Decision lens: All-in on CPI and store rank is a speed war in an inflating creative market. The lighter and more UA-dependent the game, the harder you must answer why tonight’s session belongs to you—not TikTok.

From pure buy-traffic toward creators and community

While generative AI scales creative output, teams hunt channels beyond short-term ROI ads.

Ren says core budgets still sit in performance marketing; creator spend is under 20%, yet returns look materially better, so wallets are tilting. Games emit rich behavioral data—LTV models are feasible. Meetgames, a vertical marketplace, matches creators and scrubs inflated conversion claims.

On PC and console, community paths are mature. Amazon Ads China/Korea lead Yang Tong told 21CBH that core players aged 18–34 discover titles through streams, creator trials, and word of mouth—not classic buy-traffic or chart rank alone.

Twitch, per Yang:

Metric	Figure
Avg session length	>75 minutes
Action after seeing an ad	87%
Try a product on creator rec	54%

That is a different time contract from skippable short video—trust and dwell, not impressions alone.

Friction remains: long cycles, fuzzy attribution, heterogeneous creator formats. PubMatic APAC CRO Jason Barnes expects ~50% of digital ads to run through AI agents by 2030. Silverman still warns AI cannot replace taste—incremental ideas are not pre-trained.

Decision lens: Budgets slide from “all performance” to “performance for scale + creators/community for trust.” Without LTV and attribution rails, treating creator deals like CPC will misread the channel.

CTV: another clock outside mobile red oceans

Moloco Greater China new-business director Sharon Kong told 21CBH that in 2025 US viewers averaged >3 hours/day on CTV; 88% of households used CTV at least monthly. Several top mobile and PC/console publishers in Moloco’s portfolio report measurable CTV conversion.

TikTok fights for fragments; CTV fights for couch blocks—“big screen to small screen” paths now sit beside mobile UA.

Growth and anxiety at once

H1 revenue accelerates while studios feel a red ocean—short video and micro-dramas, pricier UA, denser tests, mature markets plus lightweight genres stacked together.

Survival rarely means “ship a heavier MMORPG and punch harder.” Teams need at least two of:

1. Product: lower onboarding friction
2. Marketing: AI-driven test volume with human creative judgment
3. Channels: creators, community, or CTV beside performance ads

The hard line: you are not only bidding for store rank—you are bidding for 15 more minutes tonight. Short video and micro-dramas are in the same auction.

Sources

• High growth, shared anxiety: 2026 game exports (21CBH)
• AI creatives and UA pressure (21CBH / AppsFlyer)
• AI rewrites game rules at CJ (21CBH)