All Five gamescom Best Mobile Game Nominees Were Chinese — and an Unreleased RPG Already Has 10 Million Pre-Registrations
Gamescom Award 2026 shortlisted Arknights: Endfield, Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, Silver Palace and Where Winds Meet — five Chinese titles from four publishers, and the first time a single country has swept the category. The award went to NetEase's Where Winds Meet on August 28. Silver Palace, a game that has not launched yet, crossed 10 million pre-registrations and took a nomination anyway.
## What happened at gamescom: five nominees, one trophy On August 24, 2026, the gamescom Awards published their Gamescom Award 2026 shortlist. In the Best Mobile Game category, all five slots went to Chinese publishers: Arknights: Endfield (Hypergryph), Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero (HoYoverse), Silver Palace (Elementa / Leyuan), and Where Winds Meet (NetEase). It was the first time a single country has taken every nomination slot since the category was created. At the August 28 ceremony, NetEase's Where Winds Meet won Best Mobile Game and NetEase announced the title had passed 100 million cumulative players worldwide — the first Chinese wuxia open-world game to reach that scale. One other name belongs in the record: Tides of Annihilation, a buy-to-play action title from Chengdu-based Eclipse Glow Games, won Most Epic and was also nominated for Best PlayStation Game — a first for a Chinese premium single-player release. The category has never gone to a non-Chinese studio: Sky: Children of the Light in 2023, Genshin Impact in 2024, Love and Deepspace in 2025, and now Where Winds Meet in 2026. What changed this year is not the winner. It is that Chinese studios no longer have to split the shortlist with anyone. ## Chain reaction one: why an unreleased RPG got nominated Silver Palace is the outlier on that list. It has not launched, and it was already standing on a gamescom stage. The game is a self-developed Unreal Engine 5 open-world action RPG from Leyuan — the studio's first appearance at gamescom. Its setting is a Victorian-era city, its hook is detective fiction and suspense-driven narrative, and its combat leans into strategy as much as impact. A new trailer at gamescom's Opening Night Live ended with a 15-second post-credits teaser showing multiplayer combat for the first time. Then there is the pre-registration number. From August 28, Silver Palace opened global pre-registration across the App Store, Google Play, PlayStation Store and Epic Games Store, and passed 10 million quickly — an unusual figure for a game with no release date. Leyuan's head of public affairs, Wang Miao, kept the claim modest: a nomination proves that going global does not depend on a company's size, but on whether it can consistently build globally competitive products and truly understand what players in different markets want. He also said the studio will not accelerate an unfinished release just because the industry is paying attention. ## Chain reaction two: HoYoverse and NetEase extend the "China hour" The opening slot at Opening Night Live went to a new HoYoverse title — the first time a Chinese product has opened gamescom's ONL. NetEase's Naked Rain studio announced that Infinite (Wuxia) — its urban open-world RPG — will launch simultaneously worldwide on January 15, 2027 across PC, PlayStation 5 and mobile, with more than 10 million pre-registrations. HoYoverse's new life-simulator was dated for winter 2026, and its Honkai-series creature-collector opened its first on-site demo at the show. More than 53 Chinese companies exhibited this year, with 13 Chinese titles on stage — both records. ## The analysis: from winning to sweeping Look at the shortlist and the genres do not overlap at all: real-time strategy, open-world action RPG, anime action, urban open world. The only thing the five games share is the mobile platform. Wang Xu, co-founder of CNG data, argues this shows China's mobile development pipeline is no longer concentrated in one genre but spread across many — a sign of maturity. I would add a second layer. The important shift is not that Chinese studios made good games. It is that they made games European players can read. Silver Palace did not copy Western detective fiction; it borrowed the globally legible Victorian shell and filled it with its own character work and combat design. ## The risks: a sweep is not a knockout, and the industry is shrinking elsewhere To be clear: five Chinese nominees does not mean Chinese games lead everywhere. Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research, put it well — this is a single-category breakthrough rather than across-the-board dominance. What it proves is that mobile production pipelines and art direction now pass muster with international juries. What it does not change is that console AAA remains a gap. Nor is the industry all applause. On August 31, Supercell signed a deal to acquire the rest of Metacore, the Merge Mansion developer, with closing expected by the end of September. Supercell had already invested roughly €180 million. The reason for the sale is visible in the numbers: Merge Mansion has plateaued for years since its 2020 launch. The same day, HoYoverse shut down all servers for BSide: Olivia Lin, its AI desktop companion, and delisted it from Steam — less than 50 days after entering early access on July 13. Also on August 31, Qutang Network announced its life-sim game Mimimiha will shut down on November 30; it had topped the iOS free chart at launch in July 2025. Winning trophies in Cologne while shutting games and selling studios at home. That is what the 2026 games industry actually looks like. ## My take Silver Palace earning a gamescom nomination before launch is more interesting than Where Winds Meet winning the trophy. A win proves long-term live-service capability. A nomination proves judgment at the pitch stage — baking global audience taste into the product on day one instead of localising it at publishing time. Those are different skills, and the second one is much harder to buy. ## Over to you Would you pre-register a game that has a gamescom nomination and 10 million sign-ups but no release date? And for Chinese anime games, is the next breakthrough a matter of genre or of gameplay? Come discuss in the [Gghubs](https://www.gghubs.com/en) comments.