Chinese mobile game firms are rapidly eating into overseas markets, and Western companies cannot hope to outmatch them on scale and speed – a different approach is needed
The global mobile market is no longer a level playing field. In 2025, not a single new launch in the top 15 revenue charts for Tier-1 markets came from a Western studio.
This success is the result of a twenty-year lead in developing hyper-efficient organizational systems.
GamesIndustry.Biz has published an analysis by our Co-founder, Tanja Loktionova, decoding how Chinese studios have successfully scaled their dominance globally and what Western developers must learn to stay competitive.
Since Western studios cannot match that industrial scale, they can out-maneuver it. Tanja argues that the winning move is Talent Density: building small, elite teams of high-leverage specialists. In this new reality, an individual’s taste, cultural intuition, and creative judgment have become the defining force that allows a studio to stand out in today’s crowded market.
Read the full deep dive on the future of talent in the mobile sector: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-china-came-to-dominate-mobile-games-and-how-western-companies-can-compete-opinion-1
