How to Publish a Game in China: A Step-by-Step Guide

01

The three routes, compared

“Publishing in China” describes three different projects. They need different partners, different budgets and different amounts of patience, so settle which one you are talking about before anyone quotes you a percentage.

For most indie and small AA PC studios, Steam Global is the place to start. The game is already on sale, Chinese players already use the client, and the question is whether better language support and a defined partner brief would improve it. A domestic release is a separate project with its own commercial case. Our Steam Global vs Steam China guide compares the two in detail.

02

Why Steam Global comes first for a PC game

of Steam users set Simplified Chinese

33.7%

Largest primary language on 2024 annual data, ahead of English at 33.5% (Valve, GDC 2025)

games on Steam China

~368

Against roughly 118,000 on global Steam, December 2025 (Mighil)

imported games approved

46

January to September 2026, against 1,525 domestic approvals (Sina Tech)

Those three numbers explain the order of the routes. The audience is on global Steam already. The licensed storefront has a tiny catalogue because the licence is rationed, and imports take about 3% of the approvals that are granted. For a premium PC game, the practical question is not how to get into China but how to serve the Chinese players who can already buy it.

What that looks like in practice: Simplified Chinese in the game and on the store page, a Chinese title on the capsule (an English-only capsule reads as “no Chinese support”), Chinese subtitles on every trailer, a price set with Valve’s regional recommendation in mind, and someone reading and answering Chinese reviews from day one.

03

What a licensed domestic release involves

Steam China is the onshore service Valve operates with Perfect World. Valve states that government approval is a prerequisite for release there, and the Chinese publisher holds the approval number shown on the product page (Valve’s Steam China documentation). WeGame, the Chinese app stores and TapTap work the same way: a licensed build, operated by a Chinese entity, with real-name verification and anti-addiction controls built in.

A foreign studio cannot make that application itself. The NPPA’s own service guide for imported games sets five conditions on the applicant, the first of which is that it is a domestic publishing unit holding an online publishing service permit (NPPA service guide, October 2022, Chinese). Foreign investment in internet publishing is prohibited under the 2024 Negative List, which is why the structure is always a licence to a Chinese company, registered with the National Copyright Administration before the filing goes in.

The application itself is substantial: at least ten colour screenshots, the full Chinese-language script with a blocked-word list, reviewer and anti-addiction test accounts, review builds and a demo video of at least ten minutes. The publisher runs its own compliance pass first, so in practice the publisher is the first examiner. Reviewer practice goes well beyond the ten broad categories in law: blood, corpses, skulls, in-game maps, English text in the UI, loot box probabilities and moral-choice systems are the usual sources of modification notices.

Official NPPA fees are nil. One lawyer-authored guide estimates publisher service fees of ¥50,000 to ¥100,000 and legal and notarisation costs of ¥30,000 to ¥80,000, with localisation and content changes the largest and least predictable cost (China Game Legal, February 2026). Treat those as vendor figures. Make the decision in stages: confirm the route, agree the work and costs, then commit to the next step.

04

Mobile: the publisher does the adapting

Google Play is not available in mainland China, so Android games reach players through the phone makers’ stores and platforms such as TapTap. Apple’s China storefront has asked paid and in-app-purchase games for an approval number since July 2020, and the December 2020 clear-out removed most unlicensed paid games (Engadget). In practice a Chinese publisher takes on the whole adaptation: Simplified Chinese, the Chinese payment, analytics and anti-addiction SDKs, the licence filing and the store submissions.

Understand the order of deductions before you look at a percentage. Gross billings go first to the store (about 50% at the phone-maker Android stores, 30% at Apple), then tax, then the publisher recoups user-acquisition spend, and only then do publisher and developer share what remains. Which costs come off before the split is negotiated, so ask. Mini-game terms are published by the platforms: WeChat pays 60% of in-app purchases in cash plus 10% as advertising credit, and 50% of advertising revenue (WeChat mini-game commercial terms).

Adaptation usually means giving the publisher the source code, so scope that in the contract along with the revenue model, reporting and what happens to the Chinese build if the deal ends. Our mobile publishing page explains how those deals are typically structured.

05

Step by step: from evidence to launch

1. 1

   Measure the demand you already have

   Pull the regional wishlist and sales report from Steamworks (it exists, even though the public wishlist page hides it), count Simplified Chinese reviews, and find two or three comparable games matched on genre, price and scope. Chinese players treat a wishlist as a bookmark and often buy without one, so a low wishlist count understates China rather than overstating it.

2. 2

   Choose the route and write it down

   Name the storefront, the territory (mainland China, with Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan stated separately) and who publishes. A one-line route decision stops a partner selling you a different project than the one you priced.

3. 3

   Localise the game and the page as separate jobs

   Steam treats store-page languages and in-game languages differently (Steam’s localisation documentation). Use a Mainland Simplified Chinese font licensed for commercial use, such as Source Han Sans, and have a native speaker play the opening and tutorial in the build before you claim the language on the store. Register matters as much as accuracy: Hollow Knight: Silksong’s “half-classical” Chinese drew a public backlash in 2025 despite being correct.

4. 4

   Set the China price and discount ladder once

   Valve’s suggested China price has sat at roughly 59 to 63% of the US price; its March 2026 pricing tool offers three conversion methods, and the straight exchange-rate one overprices China. Decide the launch discount and the first-sale discount before launch. One developer who raised a launch discount from 10% to 20% in week one watched the Heybox rating fall from 8.7 to 5.6.

5. 5

   Shortlist partners with a record in your genre

   Send every candidate the same brief and compare who does the work, the committed budget and the milestones. Our guides on choosing a China publishing partner and finding a Chinese co-publisher cover the comparison and the checks.

6. 6

   Negotiate the base, not the percentage

   Revenue definition (net of Steam’s 30%, refunds, VAT and withholding?), recoupable costs listed in full, marketing commitments in writing, monthly statements with an audit right, term and reversion. See revenue share models for the arithmetic.

7. 7

   Grant the least Steamworks access the work needs

   Steamworks has task-specific user permissions for marketing, localisation and finance. Transferring the app is a separate, irreversible step that a marketing partnership never needs.

8. 8

   Open the Chinese channels before launch, and be there in launch week

   A Heybox developer account (it needs a mainland phone number, so plan for it), a Bilibili account for the trailer premiere, and a QQ group so players have somewhere to complain other than the review box. Chinese negative reviews cluster on days three to six after launch, and the games that recovered answered in Chinese within days.

06

How long it takes and what it costs

Compare the two on the same storefront and territory. A Steam Global marketing proposal and a domestic publishing proposal do not contain the same work, and a percentage from one tells you nothing about the other. Our co-publishing vs self-publishing guide sets out the like-for-like comparison.

07

What China is realistically worth

Developers who have published their numbers describe the same shape: China adds a lot of players and a smaller share of revenue, because the price is lower and refunds run higher. The spread between games is wide, and genre fit explains more of it than localisation does.

So the honest planning assumption is: a bigger share of your players than of your revenue, reviews that arrive early and in volume, and a partner share of about half of the China line if you use one. That is still worth having for a game with genuine fit, which is why the partner’s marketing commitment matters more than the headline percentage.

08

Mistakes that cost studios the China launch

• Translating the store page but not the game, then claiming the language. Players check, and the review score shows it.
• Transferring the Steam app, or sharing the studio login, when task permissions would do.
• Accepting “fully compliant” from a partner without a written route naming the entities, platforms and approvals involved.
• Comparing revenue-share percentages calculated on different bases.
• Changing the price or the discount after launch. Chinese buyers expect their region to be the cheapest and punish a change.
• Creating an “official” Chinese community over the top of fan groups that already exist. One narrative game’s recent reviews fell from 92% to 54% positive after exactly that.
• Launching without a baseline, so nobody can say what the partner delivered.

More in five mistakes Western developers make in China.

09

Where EightSix fits

EightSix is an adviser, not a publisher. We assess whether your game has a China opportunity and which route suits it, find and vet Chinese publishers with a record in your genre, negotiate the deal and check what the publisher delivers after launch. We take no licence and no share of your IP, and we do not obtain approvals or licences; the Chinese partner handles that work.

The assessment is free: send a Steam, App Store or Google Play link and we reply within one working day with a plain-English read of the demand, the likely route and the questions to resolve. There is no upfront fee. When a Chinese partner signs, EightSix charges £5,000 (or £10,000 with the launch review), credited against a share of 20% of China net revenue up to £50,000 and 10% above that.