The Overall Market Hit an All-Time High While Gacha-Anime Games Fell for Two Straight Years: Behind the 28.2 Billion, a Genre Is Being Reshuffled
In 2025, China's game market reached 350.789 billion yuan — an all-time high. But a few lines down in the same report: anime-style mobile games (二游/ACGN gacha) came in at 28.281 billion yuan, down 3.64% year over year. The second consecutive annual decline. The numbers only sting when placed side by side The 2025 China Game Industry Report was released on December 19, 2025, at the China Game Industry Annual Conference in Shanghai. China's actual game sales revenue in 2025 was 350.789 billion yuan, up 7.68% year over year; the user base hit 683 million, up 1.35%. Both are all-time highs. Another number from the same report: actual sales revenue of China's anime-style mobile game market in 2025 was 28.281 billion yuan, down 3.64% year over year. The industry's own diagnosis was blunt: first, declining revenue from head titles; second, most new releases underperforming expectations. Shutdowns were the loudest sound in the 2025 anime-game space By Jinghe's incomplete count, more than 20 anime-style games announced service termination or content suspension in 2025. Among them were projects from major studios and products that had operated for over seven years. The most striking case is Guilongchao. Developed by FunPlus's Longchaoge Studio, it featured side-scrolling action with a Chinese-trend ("guochao") aesthetic, surpassed 5 million pre-registrations during promotion, and topped the iOS free chart at launch. Revenue then slid, headcount shrank, and public sentiment turned; on September 10, 2025, the official shutdown announcement arrived — a lifespan of under a year, falling just before its first anniversary. Golden Four Eyes was even more unusual. Its producer had worked on Seer and Mole's World and had served as producer of miHoYo's Guns GirlZ (Honkai Gakuen 2). In the end, unable to raise funding, it quietly disappeared less than six months after launch. The ending of New Moon Wuxing was equally lamentable. A Cantonese-flavored "new weird fiction" style, with excellent late-game story reception — yet still, updates stopped. Jinghe's conclusion: the path of succeeding on a single long suit — "art" or "story" alone — is growing narrower and narrower. Otome games (乙游, female-oriented titles) were the hardest-hit zone. Statistics show nearly 50% of female-oriented games shut down; from The Tale of Food to Mythus's Mark, new otome games often can't survive a year. The charts are locking in too Look at the iOS grossing chart and it's more intuitive. In 2024, 20 anime-style games made the China iOS top 10 grossing list, 8 of them new releases that year; in 2025 that dropped to 14, and only one new title squeezed in — Tencent's published Goddess of Victory: Nikke — New Hope. Life isn't easy at the top, either. Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail posted revenue of 2.48 billion yuan and 721 million yuan respectively in the first three quarters of 2025, down 23.2% and 36.2% year over year. The money didn't shrink — the way it's split changed A September 7 report from Niko Partners showed China's game market surpassed $50 billion for the first time in 2025, reaching $51.8 billion, up 5.4%; it's projected to hit $59.8 billion by 2030, a five-year compound growth rate of 2.9%. The player base is expected to reach 769 million by 2030. It's not that people stopped playing games, or stopped spending. It's that the money is going elsewhere. Players are voicing clear fatigue with the "miHoYo-style gacha banner" system after five years, and — educated by round after round of shutdowns in recent years — their risk awareness has risen sharply: they'd rather spend money and time with proven developers like miHoYo and Hypergryph, and are increasingly cautious about new titles from small and mid-sized teams. There's an even more peripheral signal. On September 8, Travel Frog: China Journey posted its shutdown notice: with the IP licensing agreement expiring, operations cease on December 8. An industry insider put it plainly: the idle-game business model has inherent weaknesses — beyond a small amount of in-app purchases, it lacks sustained spending scenarios. Once the IP license expires and operating costs rise, shutdown is the most realistic option. What will 2026 look like? My view: even more polarized. On one side, the "star destroyers." NetEase's Ananta (无限大), Perfect World's Project Mugetsu (异环), Tencent's Saros Studio with Gui Huan (归环) and Fate Trigger are all on the way. Released titles have also proven the strength at the top — Arknights: Endfield launched January 22 and broke 1.2 billion yuan in global revenue within two weeks. On the other side, mid-sized teams. Competition is no longer a "war of a hundred regiments," but a handful of top-tier teams with hundreds of millions or even billions in funding colliding head-on. The truly endangered ones aren't the small teams — the small teams were eliminated long ago. It's the mid-sized companies: those that made a decent product, raised funding, and haven't landed their next one. One last line The cruelest thing about anime-style games these past two years isn't that players got fewer — it's that players got smarter. Let's talk Which game did you quit most recently? And what made you stay with the other one? Come discuss it on the Gghubs forum.