What Do Chinese Players Want From Your Game?

01

What the public record shows

of Steam users set Simplified Chinese

33.7%

Largest primary language on 2024 annual data (Valve, GDC 2025)

Steam China users in February

~2x

Spring Festival roughly doubles the monthly Chinese user count (Gamersky white paper)

China share of players, published cases

4.6% to 64%

Genre fit explains more of the spread than localisation

Chinese Steam buyers are a large, mainstream PC audience, not a niche. The published cases describe recurring tastes rather than one preference: they judge balance, build depth and length closely, so a short premium game is marked down for size; co-op over-indexes (half of Split Fiction’s reviews were Chinese); forced PvP and betrayal mechanics fall flat (Arc Raiders sat at about 70% positive in Chinese against 85% globally); and a China-set setting or DLC can move the needle, as when a Western strategy game’s China-themed expansion took its monthly China share to 37% of sales.

They also play differently. Chinese playtime on one casual title ran 50% higher than elsewhere; one producer described PC players who “play, finish, uninstall and cannot be reached”, which pushed his team towards mobile. And they buy differently: around Steam events, at a price they expect to be the lowest in the world, and often without wishlisting first.

02

Read the demand you already have

Start with your own Steam page. Group the Simplified Chinese reviews by what players actually discuss: translation, performance and connectivity, controls, difficulty, length, story and value. Keep the positive reasons to buy alongside the problems to fix. Then pull the Steamworks regional report for sales and wishlists by country; it exists even though the public wishlist page hides it.

Since August 2025, Steam shows a separate review score per language once a game has 2,000 reviews overall and 200 in that language (Valve via GamingOnLinux). If you have one, your Chinese score against your overall score is the single most useful number on the page, and the gap should be read against comparable titles, because Chinese scores run lower across the board.

03

Choose useful comparisons

Look at games close to yours in genre, price, release stage and scope. A premium strategy game needs different comparisons from a free-to-play mobile title, and a 2026 release from a 2019 one. For each comparable, note the Simplified Chinese review share, the Chinese score against the overall score, which features Chinese reviewers praise, what frustrates them and where they say they found the game. Record why each comparison is relevant before drawing a conclusion from it.

An active Chinese community around a comparable title is a reason to investigate, not a sales forecast for your own release.

04

Turn localisation into a testable brief

Agree the scope before commissioning: store copy, interface, tutorials, subtitles, dialogue and support messages. Include terminology, screenshots and context so translators can see how a line appears in play. Then review a sample in the build before approving the full job: font coverage (a Mainland Simplified Chinese font licensed for commercial use, such as Source Han Sans), line wrapping, menu widths, and whether the tutorial makes sense without the English version beside it.

Test the register, not just the accuracy. Chinese players reacted badly to Hollow Knight: Silksong’s “half-classical” Chinese and to Avowed’s translation despite both being correct, and to a 2024 Stardew Valley update that silently changed a translation they already knew. Where a fan translation exists and is loved, consider adopting it or hiring the group that made it; two Western studios did exactly that and were praised for it. Your studio signs off the language and presentation; the publisher or supplier delivers the agreed work.

05

Ask for a campaign built around the game

A platform list is not a campaign plan. Ask a prospective publisher which audience it wants to reach, why particular creators or communities fit this game, what it needs from your studio, and how it will report. For proposed activity on Bilibili, Douyin, Heybox or Xiaohongshu, ask for examples relevant to your genre and a real campaign report from a past title, with the wishlist and sales movement in it.

Then agree how feedback reaches the development team, who responds to players and in whose name, and which decisions require your approval. Chinese players cannot comfortably reach Discord or the Steam forums, so the review box and a QQ group are the complaint line; the games that recovered from a review wave answered in Chinese within days. Our marketing guide sets out the channels, the timeline and what things cost.

06

Decide what needs checking next

A useful assessment ends with a decision and its evidence. You may have enough to brief publishers now; you may need to test a localisation sample, investigate one audience segment or wait for more reviews. Do not rebuild the game around assumptions about a whole market. The published cases above span under 5% to over 60% of players from China for fully localised games, and the difference was genre fit and existing demand, not effort.

EightSix assesses the available signals, compares publisher fit and helps agree the partnership terms. The Chinese publisher handles local execution. Your studio keeps its IP, its Steam presence and the final say. The sample assessment shows what that first read looks like written down.