Spring arrives for China’s video gaming market as Tencent, NetEase and miHoYo rush to launch new titles
- Tencent is scheduled to bring several PC games to China in March and April, including Valorant and Lost Ark
- Beijing initiated a year-long crackdown on the gaming industry in late 2021, involving an eight-month freeze on new game approvals
Spring has arrived for the world’s largest video gaming market with a “normal pipeline” resuming for the launch of new games as Beijing continues to ease its industry crackdown, analysts say.
Leading Chinese video game companies Tencent Holdings, NetEase and miHoYo, have started to test and launch at least a dozen mobile and PC titles in recent months, as the market continues to recover from a winter of intense regulatory scrutiny.
Tencent is scheduled to bring several PC games to China in March and April, including Valorant and Lost Ark. Valorant is a shooter game developed by Tencent subsidiary Riot Games and was first launched in 2020 to global users, with roughly 23 million monthly active players by the end of 2022, according to data from game statistics agency ActivePlayer.
Lost Ark is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game which once had 1.32 million concurrent players on Steam, the second-highest recorded on the platform.
Another highly-anticipated title is Honkai: Star Rail, a role-playing game developed by Shanghai-based miHoYo and based on its Honkai series. It gained a licence in January and will be the first game launched by miHoYo since its hit action role-playing game Genshin Impact came out in 2020.