More than a year ago, San Francisco-based Kabamannounced that it had teamed up with China’s Longtu Games to publish a Marvel mobile game in China. Today, Kabam has a No. 1 hit in the Chinese iOS mobile game market, but it accomplished it by self-publishing the title.
Kabam’s Marvel mobile game was highlighted in the App Store in China.
Kabam’s free-to-play Marvel: Contest of Champions has generated well over $100 million in the West to date, and the company was eager to take it to China. On iOS, it self-published the title as Man Wei Ge Dou: Guan Jun Zhi Zheng (漫威格斗:冠军之争). It was a very different title, fully customized for Chinese tastes. The game quickly hit No. 1 in the download charts and has dropped off since in China, with more than 2 million downloads to date. How that happened is an instructive lesson for Western game companies who want to succeed in China, which has the largest mobile game market in the world with $7.1 billion in revenue.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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