Every summer brings a crush of gaming conventions. Few in China draw as much attention as ChinaJoy, which has been running for more than two decades.
China’s gaming industry has seen two major trends in recent years. One is the rise of homegrown games, particularly indie titles and AAA productions. The other is artificial intelligence’s advance into nearly every stage of game development, and increasingly into the player experience itself.
Improving game content has long been a theme at ChinaJoy. Over the past two years, however, AI has begun changing not only what is shown at the event, but also how games are made, distributed, and operated.
At last year’s ChinaJoy, the debate centered on whether AI could actually make games. This year, the event’s theme shifted toward the idea of playing alongside AI.
During the four days of ChinaJoy, 36Kr visited every exhibition hall and found that companies differed widely in how they interpreted and put into practice the idea of incorporating AI.
Tencent, a longtime exhibitor, presented three areas: a game IP exhibition, an AI games zone, and an AI products zone. Together, they spanned consumer experiences and enterprise tools:
- The game IP exhibition featured large installations based on eight titles: Honor of Kings, Delta Force, Nizhan Future, Arena Breakout: Infinite, Roco Kingdom: World, Animula Nook, Dungeon & Fighter, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. Many doubled as photo stops for visitors.
- The AI games zone brought together three titles: Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure, a mini game themed around China’s intangible cultural heritage; Mao Xian Zha, an agent-driven narrative roleplaying game; and Wish I Could Fly, an AI-powered platform adventure focused on storytelling.
- The AI products zone featured four products: the project Codename Craft, LAP, MagicDawn, and MagicLomix. Together, they covered several stages of production, including game development, rendering, and art.
Tencent’s approach can broadly be divided into two layers: consumer-facing experiences and enterprise-facing tools.
On the consumer side, Codename Craft allows players to describe an idea in natural language and generate a playable game. LAP is an AI platform for producing game assets across different content scenarios. MagicDawn incorporates spatial audio, global illumination, and AI-assisted package compression into its rendering pipeline. MagicLomix, built on what Tencent describes as an AI-native engine, supports more complex gameplay and higher-quality visual presentation.
Unity’s booth presented a different picture. The company said its engine powers more than 70% of leading mobile games globally and reaches more than three billion monthly active devices. This year, Unity focused on three products—Vector, Offerwall, and Aura—as well as the upcoming Unity Ads MCP and its conversational AI assistant, Campaign Assistant.
Vector, in particular, has integrated AI into advertising optimization. Developers define a business objective, after which the system continuously optimizes toward that target. Unity said campaigns optimized for advertising revenue recorded a 24% increase in installs after Vector was deployed across its advertising network.
Other exhibitors placed less emphasis on AI.
Sony Interactive Entertainment featured eight playable games, including Chinese titles from the China Hero Project, such as Daba: Land of Water Scar, Exiledge, and A Whisper of Fall: Jinyiwei, alongside overseas titles including Gran Turismo 7, Helldivers 2, and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.
The fourth phase of the China Hero Project began last year. Compared with the previous three phases, the program has expanded the support and resources available to selected projects.
Another title that drew crowds was The Defiant, which first unveiled a promotional video two years ago. The single-player first-person shooter is set against the backdrop of China’s resistance against Japanese aggression and offered a playable demo at ChinaJoy this year.
The Chinese theater was a major front in the global war against fascism, but it has received relatively limited treatment in mainstream international war games. The Defiant adds another subject and setting to the growing range of Chinese-made titles.
This year’s ChinaJoy extended beyond AI, bringing products, technology and culture, and consumer experiences and enterprise tools into increasing overlap.
During ChinaJoy, Alibaba Cloud senior solutions architect Chen Haisheng and TapTap Maker product lead Zhao Tianyi joined a live stream discussion organized by 36Kr about the gaming industry’s shift toward AI.
Chen said customers had moved beyond asking whether AI could write game code. Their focus was now on how to apply it effectively.
That distinction captures AI’s changing position at ChinaJoy. It is becoming increasingly common, but it is not the entirety of the event. Its growing importance lies partly in how deeply it is being embedded into ordinary workflows.
AI becomes part of the production stack
Break down the AI initiatives underway at game companies large and small, and three levels of integration begin to emerge.
The first is tools.
Model capabilities are no longer confined to demonstrations. They are being built directly into production pipelines.
TapTap Maker, for example, has integrated multiple models into creative processes such as game-logic generation and coding, allowing creators to use different models according to their needs.
Tencent’s Codename Craft lets people without programming or art backgrounds describe ideas in natural language and generate playable game prototypes.
Tools like these are beginning to reshape development pipelines and, in turn, the workflows built around them.
Many creators 36Kr spoke with this year were no longer discussing AI as a standalone application for one part of production. Instead, they were considering how AI could be integrated across planning, art, development, testing, and publishing.
The second level is identity.
A growing number of game companies are beginning to redefine themselves and their products around AI.
At an event in May, Mihoyo co-founder Liu Wei said the company would invest up to RMB 100 billion (USD 14.8 billion) over the next three years to support AI projects.
Earlier, Anuttacon, a Silicon Valley company led by Cai Haoyu, had set its sights on developing a next-generation, game-specific large model capable of emotional understanding and autonomous interaction.
Veteran game company 37 Interactive Entertainment, meanwhile, has used investments to build exposure across several areas of physical AI, including world models, perception and interaction, execution control, AI embodiment, and end devices.
NetEase Fuxi has also assembled a broad set of enterprise-facing capabilities through products including its Youling agent platform, ACE high-performance distributed engine, and systems for collective intelligence and collaboration.
The third level is the industry’s understanding of AI itself.
AI has shifted from being treated primarily as a new technology to becoming a default consideration for many game companies. That change in mindset may be its deepest form of integration.
During the live stream discussion at ChinaJoy, Chen divided the industry’s concerns over the past few years into three stages.
Two years ago, people were anxious about feasibility. Last year, they worried about whether agents could actually execute tasks. Now, the questions increasingly concern what happens after something has been built: how to distribute it, make it compliant, and determine how it should be rated.
Zhao pointed to TapTap Maker’s numbers. The platform had 502 games in the first half of last year. This year, it has more than 5,000, including over 4,000 games produced with some form of AI involvement, according to Zhao.
That increase in supply also creates a challenge: ensuring there are enough players for all those games.
Game companies place different bets
Look beyond the individual AI tools on display at ChinaJoy, and it becomes clear that game companies are taking several different routes.
Tencent is pursuing an ecosystem strategy.
The company spent RMB 85.8 billion (USD 12.7 billion) on R&D in 2025, while annual spending on Hunyuan and Yuanbao reached RMB 18 billion (USD 2.7 billion), according to 36Kr. That investment has continued into 2026.
For a large internet company, connecting the AI model layer with platforms, cloud infrastructure, and an existing ecosystem offers one way to build a full-stack position.
Mihoyo is taking a different route, centered on longer-term investment in proprietary R&D.
Years of revenue from successful mobile games have given the company resources to support an AI investment plan of up to RMB 100 billion, according to Liu.
Its interest in AI also predates the current boom. In 2018, Mihoyo established an internal research division focused on frontier technologies and began developing Glossa, its proprietary game-specific large model.
The company later invested in MiniMax around the time the AI startup was founded in 2021. In 2023, Cai established Anuttacon in Silicon Valley. In 2026, Mihoyo announced its three-year, RMB 100 billion AI investment plan.
37 Interactive Entertainment has followed yet another path, using investments to build exposure across different parts of the AI and robotics stack.
The strategies vary, but AI is becoming a more important competitive capability in gaming. It was not always the focus at ChinaJoy—not yet—but its growing presence across development tools, production workflows, game experiences, infrastructure, and corporate strategy points to what may lie ahead.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Liu Shiwu for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.74 = USD 1 based on estimates as of August 28, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.