When the product itself is no longer the sole determining factor for success, and the marginal effect of traffic acquisition keeps decreasing, how can we establish a genuine sense of presence in locations where overseas players are concentrated?
A subtle shift is taking place in the exhibition venues of 2026 ChinaJoy.
The most crowded areas are no longer limited to the BTOC pavilions for players. The BTOB pavilions tailored for the industry are also packed with professionals seeking solutions. Official statistics show that this edition of ChinaJoy has over 350 exhibitors in the BTOC sector and more than 500 exhibitors in the BTOB sector, with 46.6% of them being foreign-funded enterprises from 39 countries and regions. Advertising platforms, payment providers, data analytics agencies and localization service providers are flocking to the venues, all aiming to secure a larger share of the overseas budget from Chinese game companies.
This is a completely different scene from what we saw three years ago.
Meanwhile, the game industry is also facing a new inflection point.
Data from the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association shows that in the first half of 2026, the overseas revenue of self-developed games reached 12.372 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 30.22%. The figure remains impressive, but data from Sensor Tower indicates that global mobile game downloads fell by 7% year on year, the growth rate of user duration was only 0.01%, and in-app purchase revenue rose by 1.4%, almost stagnating. On the supply side, expansion is accelerating, as AI tools continue to lower the development threshold, while opportunities for effective monetization are shrinking.
Overseas expansion is still growing, but the growth pattern has changed. After the era of extensive market grabbing comes to an end, the real proposition for game manufacturers has shifted from “how to reach more players” to “how to understand local players, integrate into communities, and build long-term connections”.
The stock competition in the mobile game sector has no suspense, and a noteworthy change is underway.
PC and console games emerge as new opportunity tracks, while new challenges are also brewing
If you shift your focus away from mobile games, you will see a completely different growth curve.
Sensor Tower’s *2026 Game Market Report* shows that the revenue contribution of PC and console games accounted for half of the total overseas game revenue in 2025. Steam’s global revenue increased from 7.8 billion US dollars in 2022 to about 11 billion US dollars in 2025, with a cumulative increase of 41% over three years. Although the growth rate slowed down to 6.8% in 2025, entering a high plateau period, compared with the negative growth of mobile game downloads and stagnant user duration, PC and console games show new growth potential.
However, opportunities do not necessarily translate into commercial performance. Chinese publishers account for about one third of the total number of games worldwide, but only 4.6% of global game revenue. The huge gap between quantity and revenue not only reflects the lack of brand premium, but also means there is considerable room for improvement.
Especially when entering the PC and console market, Chinese manufacturers face far more challenges than just product R&D and distribution.
In the mobile game era, user acquisition was the absolute mainstream, with the core logic of user acquisition, conversion and retention to compete for users in app stores and feed ads. The logic of PC and console games is completely different: players have a longer decision-making cycle, and rely more on community word-of-mouth, streamer recommendations and media reviews. After the game’s launch, long-term operation requires continuous content updates and community maintenance to sustain player activity and DLC sales.
This means Chinese manufacturers need to think about a new proposition: when the product itself is no longer the only decisive factor for success or failure, and the marginal effect of traffic procurement continues to decline, how to build a real presence in places where overseas players gather?
What can a game community trusted by players do?
It is impossible to make a console game player feel a sense of belonging to a game simply by using banner ads.
But Twitch provides the possibility to truly integrate into player communities.
Twitch is the default entry point for global players to access game content. If you want to improve your skills, there are diverse operation demonstrations here; if you want to have fun, there are unique streamers who bring games to life; if you want to find a sense of belonging, there are active communities built around every single game. Interactive features such as Chat turn viewers from spectators into participants, enabling not only viewing, but also connection and co-creation.
This is the first-mover advantage of community products. The audience of Twitch itself is a core player group with high activity and high engagement. Different from pan-entertainment platforms, game content consumption on Twitch is active and focused, and the average continuous viewing time of viewers is calculated in hours. This means brand information has enough time to be received and discussed, instead of being swiped away in a second.
This point has been verified in multiple cases.
When Gryphline, the publishing brand under Hypergryph, launched *Arknights: Endfield* to the global market, it chose to launch a “public beta blitz” on Twitch. The public beta is the most critical inflection point in the game release cycle. For the first large-scale reach to players, brand awareness must reach its peak at this very moment, while the window is extremely narrow and player attention is highly fragmented.
The brand cooperated with Twitch to create an immersive interactive experience. The hostile entity “Aggeloi” in the game began to “invade” Twitch live streams, integrating into the streamers’ content and bringing unexpected interactive challenges to viewers. As the event escalated, Twitch invited streamers and the community to join “Endfield Industries” to participate in global interactive tasks, with game managers played by streamers guiding the community to advance the plot in the live rooms.
Within a few days, the Twitch community became an important driving force for this game release. In the end, the event accumulated 2.7 million minutes of total viewing time, nearly 4000 Bosses were defeated jointly by the community, and an exclusive interactive emoji that sparked heated discussions across the global Twitch community was created. Game release is no longer a one-way broadcast from the brand to players, but a collective event completed by the community together.
If *Arknights: Endfield* verifies that the community itself is a distribution channel, then the “Rogue Shadow Ops” event of *Call of Duty: Black Ops 6* redefines the community as content itself.
*Call of Duty* is a legendary IP with a 20-year history, boasting millions of daily active players. The release of every new title is a major event in the gaming industry, and maintaining this level of market popularity requires breakthrough marketing approaches. The creative team deeply integrated the high-stakes action experience of *Call of Duty* with Twitch’s interactive culture, creating a “game within a game” that is not only a live show, but also an interactive suspense drama and even a social experiment.
Before the release, the team built two original 3D interactive rooms containing puzzles, codes and mechanisms, which required viewers to cooperate with streamers through the chat room to decrypt. The first global Twitch exclusive emoji for *Call of Duty* was introduced, and viewers could collectively send the emoji to unlock doors and crack safes. The first ever brand Raid in Twitch history seamlessly transferred thousands of viewers to the next creator’s live room, allowing the task to continue across multiple streamers. The climax was the first offline interrogation room in Twitch history, where two creators were “kidnapped” to the scene for interrogation, with chat room viewers acting as the jury to dominate the direction of the interrogation in unpredictable ways.
After the release, teams from the UK and Germany competed head-to-head in the new game, and the chat room continued to act as the “mission command center” to unlock in-game challenges and designate combat targets.
According to disclosed data, the event finally reached 2.7 million minutes of total viewing time, 5.5 times the benchmark value; the global exclusive emoji was used more than 550,000 times; the total number of unique viewers exceeded 423,000, a 48% increase over the benchmark; there were more than 105,000 chat messages, 28 times the benchmark value. Brand promotion effects were also remarkable: brand awareness increased by 2.2 percentage points, favorability rose by 9.0 percentage points, purchase intention increased by 10.1 percentage points, and recommendation intention was up by 10.4 percentage points. This case also won the Gold Award in the Content Entertainment & Collaboration category at The Drum Awards.
It is worth noting that this marketing approach centered on creator trust and community participation is not only applicable to the game industry.
When a Chinese new energy vehicle enterprise entered the Saudi Arabian market, it also chose Twitch as its entry point. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest automotive markets in the Middle East, with a high proportion of young population, and gaming culture deeply influences local entertainment and technology trends. The brand wanted to reach tech-savvy young audiences, but traditional car advertising can hardly build real connections with this group.
The brand cooperated with three local Saudi Twitch streamers, transforming the vehicle’s Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) function into a real gaming experience during live streams. The streamers did not interrupt the viewing experience in the form of traditional ads, but introduced the brand in a natural conversational way during the gaming process, making the integration perfectly blend into the Twitch environment. Channel package ads combined with custom visual elements maintained continuous brand visibility in each live stream without causing interference.
The results exceeded expectations. The three creators generated more than 3.38 million impressions, reached over 16,000 unique viewers, and the total viewing time of brand content exceeded 4,900 hours, with one streamer’s audience having an average viewing time of over 49 minutes. Viewers spontaneously discussed the product in the chat, showed great interest in its functions, and were guided to offline exhibition halls for experience. Digital interaction was eventually converted into real-world purchase intention.
From games to automobiles, these cases all illustrate that on Twitch, brands are not “buying impressions”, but “participating in culture”. As Generation Z is deep in content trust crisis, with nearly 80% believing that social media content is false, and 68% feeling overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated content, even calling this type of content “slop (digital garbage)”, the value of real creators, real interactions and real communities is being revalued. What viewers want is unexpected surprises, unfiltered immersion, and the appeal brought by real people. These are exactly what banner ads and programmatic delivery cannot provide.
And Twitch is just one piece of Amazon’s media re
Behind Twitch is the continuously upgraded marketing capability of Amazon Ads
From Twitch, we catch a glimpse of a larger territory that Amazon Ads is opening up.
In the past, the industry’s perception of Amazon Ads was long limited to “in-e-commerce advertising” — search result positions and product detail pages, with the core logic of delivering the final nudge when “people are looking for products”. This perception lags far behind the expansion of Amazon Ads in the past few years.
A research report released by JPMorgan in July 2026 shows that Amazon Ads has firmly secured its position as the world’s third largest digital advertising solution, with an estimated revenue of 83 billion US dollars in 2026, a year-on-year increase of 21%; its operating profit margin is as high as 46%, which will contribute about 38 billion US dollars in operating profit, accounting for 36% of Amazon’s total operating profit. Amazon’s 2026 Q2 financial report shows that the advertising revenue in a single quarter reached 19.8 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 26%, and its growth rate has led the world’s top digital advertising platforms for several consecutive quarters. Advertising has become Amazon’s third growth pole besides AWS and e-commerce, and is also one of the businesses with the highest profit margin.
What supports this growth is far more than just in-site search ads.
From Amazon Mall to Twitch, Prime Video, Fire TV, Alexa, Kindle, and then to high-quality global streaming reuously expanding its ad inventory and streaming reach capabilities, covering more scenarios where consumers watch, listen, entertain and interact
Over the past year, a series of strategic partnerships have outlined the expansion speed of this network: Spotify Ad Exchange is directly integrated with Amazon DSP, allowing advertisers to programmatically purchase Spotify’s music and podcast ad resources to connect with audiences in different listening scenarios; Netflix opens up its ad inventory to Amazon DSP, so that U.S. advertisers can use Amazon Audiences to deliver Netflix ads based on signals such as lifestyle, interests and active shopping intentions, making streaming ads not only responsible for coverage and awareness, but also supporting more complete audience strategies combined with shopping signals; Disney cooperated with BrightLine to allow advertisers to place enhanced ads such as remote control interaction, content carousel and QR codes in Disney’s streaming resources; Amazon Ads partnered with LinkedIn to introduce professional audience signals such as job titles, industries and job levels into the CTV scenario, reaching B2B audiences in the streaming TV environment; partnerships with Roku and Samsung TV Plus further expanded the coverage of connected TV, and extended interactive video ads from content viewing to direct actions such as “add to cart” and “send to mobile”.
These partnerships collectively point to a forming infrastructure: an ad network spanning e-commerce, game live streaming, long and short videos, music podcasts, living room big screens and professional social platforms, with Amazon Ads at the center, scheduling through a unified DSP and audience system.
However, the scale of inventory itself does not constitute a moat. The digital advertising industry is never short of media re
The key to competition in future advertising is not just “who has more inventory”, but who has more real consumer signals, and the ability to convert signals into large-scale precise reach. The digital advertising industry is undergoing a paradigm shift: the demise of third-party cookies, restrictions on IDFA, and the trust crisis caused by the proliferation of AI content have jointly shaken the foundation of the traditional advertising ecosystem. Probabilistic matching is becoming increasingly inaccurate, interest tags are getting more and more generalized, and users’ tolerance for ads is getting lower and lower. While advertisers are dispersing their budgets across more channels, they are increasingly unable to answer a basic question: who exactly saw my ad, and are they really interested?
This precisely constitutes a unique competitive advantage of Amazon Ads today.
Different from building audiences mainly relying on search keywords, interest tags or third-party data, Amazon has first-party signals from real shopping, browsing and content consumption behaviors. These signals are real occurrences. Through the Authenticated Graph, these signals can be combined with deterministic identity connections, covering more than 90% of households in the United States in an encrypted, pseudonymized way, supporting cross-channel audience targeting, deduplicated reach, frequency management and effect measurement, without exposing personal identity information to advertisers.
The conversion efficiency of search ads in the “people looking for products” link is irreplaceable, and social media as a traffic entry forms a synergy with Amazon’s subsequent marketing, which also allows Amazon Ads to fill a long-standing gap: in the complete journey from awareness to conversion, use deterministic signals to replace probabilistic guesswork, and use cross-screen and cross-scenario frequency management to replace the waste of repeated exposure.
For Chinese brands going global, this means there is another noteworthy solution for global marketing.
Over the past decade, the marketing path for Chinese brands to go global has been relatively single: buying traffic on channels, optimizing rankings in app stores, and winning by price and efficiency. However, as the stock competition in the mobile game sector intensifies, the demand for branding in PC and console games rises, and high-unit-price categories such as consumer electronics and automobiles accelerate their overseas expansion, marketing goals are shifting from short-term conversion to equal emphasis on brand building and long-term growth. What brands need is not just a delivery channel, but a set of infrastructure that can understand local consumers, integrate into local culture, and measure the full-link effect.
Amazon Ads is no longer just helping brands sell to the world, but also helping them connect with global consumers and build global brands. From community co-creation on Twitch, to brand stories on Prime Video or other sports events
