I recently had the pleasure of attending ChinaJoy, China’s largest consumer event focused on digital entertainment. ChinaJoy is known for having a heavy focus on all things gaming-related, but this year, there was also a strong showout from AI, physical goods, and Anime-related businesses. Further ado, here is a brief collection of my takeaways from the event.

Event Breakdown:

In summary, there was a total of 799 exhibitors and 400k visitors (64% between the ages of 18 and 29) over the 4-day event. Exhibitors were split fairly evenly across B2B and B2C zones. The B2C crowd was a lot more diverse than the B2B section, which was dominated by payments providers and D2C companies (i.e., webshops). In the B2C area, exhibitors were broken down into themes and placed in their own dedicated exhibition halls (large warehouses), with gaming having the largest presence across two dedicated halls, followed by physical goods, tech/software, anime/cosplay, and other.

To my surprise, Snapdragon, the Qualcomm-owned systems-on-chip (SoC) producer, had the largest booth in the entire event (taking up an entire warehouse all to itself and its partners). But the usual suspects all turned out to promote a mix of best-performing and soon-to-launch products, including Tencent, Netease, Blizzard, HarmonyOS (Huawei), Bandai Namco, Century Games, Lilith, Perfect World, and many more.

You could tell which games had the most publishing dollars behind them by seeing how much floor space they had to share with other games under the same booth. For example, Lilith, a mobile gaming giant known for its SLG