Most Western studios are launching in China, but the route to its players is less than clear.

80% of Western game developers plan to release a game in China by 2028, according to our latest whitepaper, By The Book? Western Developer Perceptions of China's PC Games Market. Atomik Research ran the survey for Rokky with 300 senior developers in the US and the UK.

The interest is clear. Knowledge of how the market works is patchier. Developers understand the licensing rule: 87% know a game needs an ISBN to appear on official Chinese storefronts. Past that point, the answers diverge. Fewer than half (44%) correctly identified WeGame, Tencent's PC platform, as a storefront. Asked how Chinese players mainly buy PC games, 59% pointed to ISBN-approved platforms such as WeGame and Steam China, and 31% to the international version of Steam accessed via VPN. Just 6% named Steam keys bought from local e-stores, a distribution route the whitepaper also examines.

We work through these questions with our partners regularly. Rokky has distributed PC games in China for more than a decade, and in July 2026 we co-published Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged there with Revolution Software. Our new webinar, Western Developer Perceptions of China's PC Games Market, opens that conversation up to everyone.

Our CEO & Co-Founder Vadim Andreev is joined by:

Will Freeman (host), a veteran games journalist who has written for IGN and Eurogamer and is a former editor of Develop
Charles Cecil, CEO & Founder of Revolution Software and creator of the Broken Sword series
Ilya Gutov, CEO of Meridian Play, an advisory and accelerator that helps game companies enter Asian markets. He has more than ten years of experience in APAC across publishing, market entry and investment

Together they discuss:

The opportunity. What China offers Western studios. 70% of executives in our survey see higher unit sales as the biggest upside.
The hesitations. What holds developers back. Partnership barriers and dense regulation were each named as the main concern by 43% of respondents.
Discovery. How a Western game gets found by local player communities in a market where familiar channels don't work. Nearly a quarter of developers (24%) still ranked Google Ads, which is blocked in China, as their top marketing channel.

Watch the full webinar below.

Read the full research
The webinar builds on the data in By The Book?. The whitepaper sets out what Western developers believe about licensing, storefronts, purchasing habits and marketing in China, and where those assumptions don't match how the market works.
Download the whitepaper

Missed last year's webinar?
Our previous webinar, The State of PC Games Distribution, looked at the wider PC market: Steam's dominance, the rise of alternative marketplaces and the grey market.
Watch last year's webinar

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