China is routinely the second-largest wishlist source on a Steam page, and for the right genre it can be the largest. But studios keep treating it as an afterthought machine-translated text, a launch tweet nobody in China can see, and then surprise when the numbers flatline. Get the groundwork right and you unlock a market that converts wishlists to sales as fast as any in the world.
Marketing A Game In China Starts With Real Simplified Chinese
The single biggest lever is the quality of your Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans). Chinese players are blunt and public about bad localization a single garbled UI string or a literal machine-translated tagline will show up in your reviews within hours of launch, and Chinese reviews carry weight because the playerbase reads them carefully before buying.
Hire native translators who play games, not a generic agency that bills per word. Give them context: screenshots, a glossary of proper nouns, and the tone you want. Idioms, humor, and item names rarely survive a literal pass, and chengyu (four-character idioms) used well signal that a human who cares did the work. Budget for a second native pass after the strings are in the build, because length and line breaks behave differently in Chinese.
- Translate the store page, screenshots/capsule text, and trailer subtitles not just the in-game UI
- Localize the capsule image text itself; English-only key art reads as 'not for us'
- Keep a living glossary so item, character, and skill names stay consistent across updates
- Run a native QA pass in-build to catch truncation, overflow, and font-rendering bugs
The Platforms That Actually Reach Chinese Players
Western channels are mostly invisible behind the Great Firewall. Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit, Discord, and Google Ads do not reach the mainstream Chinese player. You build awareness on the platforms they actually use, and the heavyweight for PC games is Bilibili it functions as both YouTube and a community hub for the exact demographic that buys indie and AA games on Steam.
Seed gameplay videos and dev diaries to Bilibili creators, maintain an official account there, and pair it with WeChat (official account for announcements) and a presence on TapTap and the relevant Tieba/forum communities. A single mid-tier Bilibili creator covering your genre can drive more wishlists in a weekend than a month of Western ads.
- Bilibili gameplay videos, dev vlogs, and a verified official channel
- WeChat official account launch dates, patch notes, and direct community updates
- TapTap discovery and ratings for the mobile-and-PC crossover audience
- Creator outreach in Chinese, through someone who knows the local etiquette and rates
Price Like A Local, Not A Converted Dollar Figure
Steam lets you set a dedicated CNY price, and you should never ship the auto-converted USD number. Chinese players are extremely price-aware and have a strong sense of what a 'fair' regional price is for your tier of game. Set it too high and you'll see it called out in reviews; set it sensibly and you remove the last barrier between a wishlist and a purchase. A Steam Pricing Planner pass helps you sanity-check the regional number against comparable titles before you commit.
Respect the discount rules too: Steam restricts how often and how deeply you can cut a price, so plan your CNY launch discount and seasonal sales as part of one calendar rather than reacting later.
Timing, Festivals, And The Wishlist Engine
Chinese holidays move the needle. Spring Festival, Golden Week, and Singles' Day are massive playtime-and-spending windows, and aligning a sale or content drop with them compounds your visibility. Layer that on top of Steam's own Next Fest and seasonal sales, and you have a calendar where Chinese wishlists do real work the larger your wishlist base before a sale, the bigger the front-page visibility spike when it converts.
If you're running paid acquisition, treat China as its own channel with its own creatives and its own Paid Ads Setup, not a line item in a global campaign. The creative, the platform, and the call-to-action all have to be native. Use the Steam Wishlist Calculator to model how an incremental block of Chinese wishlists feeds into your launch-day and sale-day sales, so you know what the localization and outreach spend is actually buying.
If you want a second set of eyes on your China plan localization quality, Bilibili outreach, or regional pricing that's exactly the kind of thing we work through with studios. Start with the part that's cheapest to fix and most visible to players: the Simplified Chinese on your store page, and build outward from there.