Anime-Style Games Fell Two Years Straight with 20+ Shutdowns — So Why Is 2026 Cramming in the Most New Titles in History?
In 2025, more than 20 anime-style (gacha) games announced shutdowns or halted updates. That same year, domestic Chinese gacha mobile revenue was ¥28.281 billion, down 3.64% year over year — a decline for the second consecutive year. By conventional logic, this is when you run. Instead, in 2026, everyone is piling in. First, the data straight. The China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association's 2025 China Game Industry Report shows: domestic game market revenue in 2025 was ¥350.789 billion, up 7.68%, with 683 million users — both record highs. Gacha was the sole exception — ¥28.281 billion, down 3.64%, two full years below the 2023 peak of ¥31.707 billion. The report's explanation was blunt: first, several flagship titles' revenue was declining; second, most new releases underperformed expectations. Layer one: the rankings are shrinking. According to Jinghe's statistics, 20 gacha games cracked the iOS top-grossing TOP10 in 2024; only 14 did in 2025. The only new release to break into the TOP10 was Tencent's published Goddess of Victory: Nikke sequel. How entrenched are the leaders? It's the same old faces — HoYoverse, Papergames, Hypergryph, Kuro. The shutdown list was just as long: otome games, strategy RPGs, card battlers, MMORPGs, box-gardens — every genre had casualties. Layer two: the 2026 lineup is even bigger. Perfect World's Hotta Studio spent five years and 500 people on Neverness to Everness, which launched across all platforms on April 23, with over 35 million global pre-registrations and an 8.8 TapTap score. On Tencent's side, Saros Studio's Loop of Fate is China's first open-world gacha game to make "time loop" its core premise — a planet with 42 days left, where players accumulate information advantages through repeated death loops to turn the tables, key plot nodes decided by D20 rolls, with some items rerollable. Tencent currently holds 68 titles in reserve, at least 23 of which have major milestones this year. Layer three: this week's gacha calendar is packed too. On September 8, Arknights × Persona 3 Reload crossover merch opened pre-orders — Makoto Yuki, Yukari Takeba, Aigis, and Koromaru all joining as crossover operators, with a "School Pass" bonus card set for orders over ¥259. On September 9, Zenless Zone Zero launched a new main story; on September 10, Onmyoji's tenth anniversary welcomed SSR Ishinokami, Honor of Kings: Chess went live, and Roco Kingdom: World's S4 "Lunar Rhapsody" opened. Why are new titles flooding in while the market falls? Because what's falling is old product, not demand. The two causes of the 2025 decline are fundamentally supply-side problems: flagship products entering natural decline, and new products failing to catch the baton. The 2026 class of new games is betting on the same thing — the previous generation raised player expectations but failed to satisfy them. The comparison cases are clear: after Genshin Impact, the anime open-world track never produced a second blockbuster of the same magnitude. Tencent's play this time is the "time loop + CRPG dice checks" combination, NetEase's Where Winds Meet goes urban (globally launching January 2027), Hypergryph is betting on Arknights: Endfield, and HoYoverse is branching off its Honkai IP. Different approaches, same direction: use gameplay differentiation — not art-budget stacking — to earn a user's first download. But I don't think 2026 is a lock. Risk one: too many products crowded into the same window — players only have so many hours, and some titles are destined to be the denominator. Risk two: user-acquisition costs — mini-program games hit ¥53.535 billion in 2025, up 38.56%, fighting gacha for the same ad budget and the same user hours. Risk three: path dependence — time loops, urban open worlds, dice checks; these mechanics sound fresh, but none has yet proven it can sustain 60+ hours of content consumption. I'd rather read 2026 as a collective bet than a collective recovery. The "Shanghai Big Four" (gacha studios) have pushed all their chips onto the next generation — the 2025 "gap year" wasn't incapacity, it was holding breath. The exam papers get handed in during 2026, and it all rides on this year. One thing I am fairly confident about: gacha players haven't stopped paying — they've stopped paying for "yet another similar game." The reason Loop of Fate's 42-day premise broke out is that it made people feel for the first time that "losing is still progress." If that idea holds, it's worth more than any splash art. Among the 2026 gacha class, which ones have you pre-registered for? And is there one you've quietly unfollowed? Come compare answers in the [Gghubs](https://www.gghubs.com/en/) comments.