China’s game makers

From scripts and storylines to customer service and user-generated worlds, developers are deploying LLM tools across the gaming pipeline

The new year kicked off with the blockbuster public market debuts of two Chinese artificial intelligence high-flyers – Zhipu AI and MiniMax – making them the world’s first publicly listed large language model (LLM) start-ups.

The listings put them ahead of US rivals including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Amazon.com-supported Anthropic, which have yet to reach public markets.

Both Chinese companies have been backed by heavyweight investors, including state-linked funds and big tech groups such as Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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Less visibly but just as significantly, however, some of China’s dedicated gaming companies have also been bankrolling the rise of the country’s top AI developers.

These include miHoYo, the maker of Genshin Impact – one of the most successful mobile games ever produced by a Chinese developer – and 37 Interactive Entertainment, a prolific backer of China’s AI ambitions.

MiHoYo was an early investor in MiniMax, while 37 Interactive, also known as 37wan, has taken stakes in Zhipu, Moonshot AI and Baichuan. The four firms are widely dubbed China’s “four AI tigers”.

The gaming sector’s enthusiasm for AI reflects a push to revive growth and reduce the rising cost of producing blockbuster titles, as developers look for ways to build larger, more complex games without dramatically expanding headcount.

Gaming companies see AI as a “catalyst needed to push the gaming industry past its recent period of stagnant growth and into a new era”, according to Noah Ramos, a global strategist at investment consultancy Alpine Macro, an Oxford Economics company.

Ramos noted that consumer spending power had weakened, while development budgets continued to climb. At a standard US$70 price point, modern console games were roughly one-third cheaper in inflation-adjusted terms than they were 20 years ago, Alpine Macro data showed.

For game studios, investing in LLM developers offers both potential financial returns and access to tools that can accelerate content creation, automate routine tasks and support live operations.

MiHoYo has been using MiniMax’s LLMs in the development of its popular title Honkai: Star Rail since 2023, leveraging the models to generate scripts, story elements and 3D content assets to speed up development.

37 Interactive has embedded Moonshot AI’s Kimi model into its online customer service system to help handle player inquiries, while Zhipu AI’s GLM model has been used by the developer to co-create game plots.

Ramos said AI could enable studios to produce large-scale games with cinematic appeal using smaller teams by automating much of the manual work, arguing that “gaming is entering a golden era fuelled by AI”.

China’s largest gaming companies are also moving quickly to integrate AI into their development pipelines.

NetEase has partnered with Tripo AI, a 3D generation developer, to allow players of Eggy Party to create their own virtual environments. Tencent has integrated DeepSeek technology into its team survival title Game for Peace, allowing users to interact with an AI-powered avatar.

Daniel Ahmad, research director at gaming industry consultancy Niko Partners, said Chinese video game companies were leveraging AI across multiple stages of production, from operations and publishing to marketing and player engagement.

“It is primarily being seen as a way to reduce development costs, speed up game development, expedite user acquisition and create new experiences,” Ahmad said, adding that AI adoption appeared higher in China and Asia’s game sector than in the US, based on player surveys and discussions with industry executives.

Ahmad pointed to Tencent’s suite of AI tools for third-party game developers, and NetEase’s efforts to use AI to drive in-game content across titles including Justice Mobile and Eggy Party.

“This contrasts with the US and Europe, where generative AI is still fairly experimental,” he added.