On some corners of the internet, young people have recently taken to only-half-jokingly pining for a more Chinese way of living, and not just in celebration of the lunar new year. They express this Sino-affinity by “Chinamaxxing,” which mostly involves performative stereotypical activities like squatting while blasting cigs or singing the Fei Yu-Ching standard “A Spray of Plum Blossoms,” which had its own viral moment in 2024 when duetted by deepfaked Biden and Trump.
As with any fad nearly past its prime, kids saying “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” was recently unpacked by a wave of late-to-the-party legacy media thinkpieces. When not blathering on about the meme trend actually being a calculated soft power grab, these reports pivoted to headscratching over how Gen Z’s collective pining to be “saved by President Xi” and join the country with a homeownership rate over 90% could be anything more than “parody.” But it’s not just Zoomers looking to flee the “American Century of Humiliation” for a more prosperous Chinese future.
Epyllion’s 2026 “State of Gaming” report, the annual breakdown by company CEO Matthew Ball, painted a grim picture for the industry overall, which laid off one-third of its workforce in 2025 and has been facing a sharp decline in VC investments. As the SoG report notes, the only standout winner (besides Roblox) in this otherwise bleak landscape is China, which was responsible for 20% of global player spending in 2025 and boasts over 725 million gamers—more than half its total population.
However, 84% of the spending by Chinese players was sent right back to Chinese developers. While this has resulted in the expansion of China’s domestic game industry, which accounted for 38% of the industry’s overall growth, the shift elicited a dire prognosis from Ball: “China is eating the video gaming industry.”
And it’s not just the Chinese playing and paying for Chinese games. Ball’s breakdown aligns with earlier trade reporting that Chinese mobile games have come to dominate the North American market. Concurrently, US and UK-based mobile developers are struggling to stay afloat, pointing to exorbitant Apple and Google app store fees and fewer paying users as chief among their struggles. Spare a thought for the poor addicts of freemium games like Candy Crush who, as Ball notes in the report, have been forced to contend with yet another year of premium currency inflation. Thanks a lot, Mandarin-speaking Biden and Trump!
Even the AAA games market, once dominated by the US and Japan and now increasingly seen as a risky investment for funders and gamers alike, has been forced to bend a knee to the power of Chinese market forces. China’s first big AAA crossover hits with Western audiences were 2020’s free-to-play open world RPG Genshin Impact and 2024’s Wuxia souls-like Black Myth: Wukong. In 2026 and beyond, gamers can expect to see even more high-budget fare exploring Chinese folklore and history in their favorite PC or console marketplace. A few upcoming examples that have already piqued the online gaming community’s interest: a game where you play as a giant chicken that’s been described as a God of War/The Witcher mashup, and an FPS set in the Second Sino-Japanese War that seems likely to give the bombast and jingoism of the Call of Duty series a run for its money.
If Ball’s analysis bears out, Western developers and publishers do seem at least somewhat doomed to suffer for their indolent and avaricious ways. The common gamer, at least, may still have a bright future ahead of them and will indeed become a bit more Chinese, whether they realize it or not.
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