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Western developers may bag just a 20% revenue share in China — and it may be worth it

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Western developers publishing mobile games in China may wind up with revenue shares that could be as low as 20 percent — or even 10 percent.

That’s the grim reality of taking your game to the world’s biggest mobile gaming market, based on panel discussions at the Casual Connect game conference in San Francisco. By comparison, they could have a 70 percent share by publishing in the West. But China’s upside could be big, because the market opportunity is astounding, with more than half a billion smartphones in the market.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

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.