Bilibili: From Games to Mega-Platform

Bilibili was founded in 2009 with anime, comics, and games (or ACG) at its core, as a danmaku video community in which viewer comments scroll across the video. Around 2020, it pushed beyond its fandom roots and leaned into other major content sections (like lifestyle, knowledge, cars). Now, as of the second quarter of 2026, Bilibili had 117M daily active users (and 371M monthly active users) who spent an average of 113 minutes on the app each day.

When Bilibili listed on Nasdaq in 2018, games made up 71% of its revenue, and its filings show most of that came from one licensed Japanese mobile game, Fate/Grand Order. Since then, its other businesses have grown much faster, and in 2025 games made up just 21% of revenue.

Bilibili’s game revenue grew from RMB 2.94B (~$440M) in 2018 to RMB 6.39B (~$950M) in 2025. This makes it a globally underdiscussed gaming company, but this segment also pales in comparison to its growth in other areas, like its ads revenue (up from RMB 460M (~$69M) in 2018 to RMB 10.06B (~$1.5B) in 2025) and value-added services (VAS), such as memberships and livestreaming (up from RMB 590M (~$88M) to RMB 11.93B (~$1.8B)), with each segment growing roughly twentyfold.

Today, developers and publishers promote their upcoming games on Bilibili, from big domestic single-player titles to multi-platform shooters and wuxia online games from Tencent and NetEase. For example, when a 13-minute gameplay demo for the action RPG Black Myth: Wukong was shared in 2020, the clip went on to receive more than 65M views on Bilibili. That means Bilibili reaps adjacent revenue from games that spend their publishing dollars elsewhere.

Bilibili has become a core marketing channel for games in China, yet its own game business lags far behind that influence. That makes it a useful case study. In China, game value is shifting away from the right to publish a game and toward where players decide what to play. Let’s explore how Bilibili got here, why its gaming ambitions have fallen behind, why influencing demand has become a bigger business, and what it means for the future.

Why the Original Game Model Stopped Working

In its early gaming days, Bilibili mostly published anime-style mobile games, many based on popular Japanese IP it had licensed. It could cheaply market those games to fans who already followed those series on its site. Bilibili’s biggest title was the gacha-style mobile RPG Fate/Grand Order (FGO), which Bilibili released in China in September 2016. Bilibili followed that with the naval-warfare collection game Azur Lane (May 2017) and the anime RPG Princess Connect! Re:Dive (April 2020).

Those days are long gone. When miHoYo’s anime-flavored gacha RPG Genshin Impact launched in September 2020, it raised the bar for quality and budgets in Chinese anime-style games, and China-developed originals (like Genshin Impact and Arknights) rose to the top of domestic revenue charts.

Sensor Tower data shows that the combined estimated China iOS net revenue of Bilibili’s three main titles dropped 46% in the 12 months after Genshin Impact launched. Sensor Tower tracks in-app purchases through app stores and does not cover China’s Android channels, so these figures show trends only.

Bilibili’s two Japanese-licensed games fell hardest. In the 12 months after Genshin Impact’s release, Sensor Tower estimated that FGO and Princess Connect’s China iOS net revenue fell by 42% and 66%, respectively. Azur Lane, developed by a Chinese team, fared better: its revenue fell only 9%, and it hit a new high in China in 2022.

The core challenge extended beyond Japanese titles losing ground to domestic releases. Because foreign developers cannot directly secure a Chinese gaming license, they must team up with a local publisher — creating the exact opportunity where Bilibili once added value. Conversely, domestic studios like miHoYo and Hypergryph self-publish and don’t need a local publishing partner. As the market pivoted toward native Chinese titles, Bilibili’s primary competitive advantage diminished. Additionally, it couldn’t offset this loss solely through distribution: native games target broad multi-platform releases, making Bilibili’s Genshin Impact channel server just one option among many and yielding significantly lower returns than exclusive licensing deals like FGO.

Today, Bilibili’s platform and its games have diverged. Bilibili’s newer users came for lifestyle, knowledge, and car content, not anime-style mobile games; however, its gaming focus has largely remained with its original ACG-oriented audience.

Why Bilibili Became a Key Marketing Channel for Games

Broadening the platform didn’t bring new players to Bilibili’s own anime-style games, but it made Bilibili a place to promote all kinds of games. The platform is full of gaming creators, known as UP主, who make gameplay footage, walkthrough guides, memes, fan works, and other content about almost any game, keeping a game in conversation long after launch. That reach is a business in itself: management has said on earnings calls that games are its top advertising sector, without elaborating on the exact percentage.

Overseas games without a Chinese license show how this works. They cannot be sold in Chinese app stores, but Chinese players can buy them directly on Steam. For example, Netmarble’s Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is an action RPG sold only on Steam and Xbox PC. Its Bilibili account has around 3,200 followers, yet its six videos have tallied 6.5M views. The four most-watched videos align with the moments that drive purchases: pre-order openings, the launch countdown, influencer reviews, and release day. A gap that wide between views and followers may point to paid promotion, putting the videos in front of Chinese players who don’t follow the account but buy games on Steam.

Why Bilibili’s Own Games Haven’t Kept Pace

On the fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, Chen Rui, Bilibili’s chairman and CEO, said that about 70% of its game revenue came from long-running titles such as San Guo: Mou Ding Tianxia, FGO, and Azur Lane. The older titles are still declining, just more slowly. According to Sensor Tower estimates, combined China iOS revenue for FGO, Azur Lane, and Princess Connect fell 21% YoY in the first nine months of 2025, then fell another 10% YoY over the same period in 2026. FGO’s 2025 revenue was about a sixth of its 2017 peak, Azur Lane’s was down nearly half from its 2022 high, and Princess Connect now earns almost nothing. The old portfolio is clearly not driving growth.

Among newer games, only San Guo has carried the business. Licensed exclusively by Bilibili and launched in June 2024, it helped lift Bilibili’s game revenue 40% YoY in 2024 to RMB 5.61B (~$840M). But it is past its peak. Its worldwide net monthly revenue fell from $25.69M in August 2024 to $4.76M in September 2026, down 81.5% (86% in mainland China). Bilibili’s game revenue followed suit, declining 12%–14% YoY for three straight quarters through Q2 2026.

Bilibili is still placing new bets, and where it places them says a lot. Its 2026 publishing slate includes two more Three Kingdoms games: the competitive card game San Guo: Bai Jiang Pai and the upcoming Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Wangdao Tianxia, a sandbox SLG like San Guo. On the in-house side, creature collector Lumi Master launched worldwide on September 17, 2026, Bilibili’s most important new direction outside Three Kingdoms games. Sensor Tower estimates (excluding China Android) that it drew 1.63M downloads worldwide in its first 30 days, more than San Guo’s 1.09M in China, but made only $5.5M, less than a fifth of San Guo’s take. Creature collecting is a sound direction, but Bilibili came late to it, and Lumi Master cannot yet fill the gap San Guo is leaving.

Bilibili’s most successful in-house game is quite different. PC extraction shooter Escape from Duckov (developed in-house by Team Soda), released in October 2025, sold one million copies in its first week and passed three million in less than a month, again thanks to gaming creators. Its revenue, booked under the mobile games line, was too small to move the total: in the quarter Duckov launched, Bilibili’s game revenue still fell 14% YoY. Bilibili’s indie-oriented Steam publishing has run since 2018, but it has always been a relative side quest.

Management has shifted Bilibili’s game strategy several times, yet each phase rested on a single type of game. After heavy losses in 2022, Chen Rui told in-house development to focus on only one or two directions, and Bilibili moved from anime-style games to Three Kingdoms SLGs and then to creature collecting. It now has room to experiment: Bilibili generated RMB 7.15B (about $1.07B) in operating cash flow in 2025, and advertising and VAS made up about 77% of its revenue as of the second quarter of 2026. The game line is no longer a matter of survival, but there are no signs it will expand again.

So this ~$1B game-revenue business, while meaningful and underdiscussed, will most likely become a smaller part of Bilibili. Management expects game revenue to grow again in the fourth quarter of 2026, and it very well may, but advertising and VAS are growing steadily faster.

Conclusion

Bilibili’s decade in games reflects a shift in where value sits in China’s game industry. Value is moving away from publishing and traditional distribution (holding licenses, securing approvals, taking a cut through app stores and channel servers) and toward the attention that creator content generates. As a publisher, Bilibili ended up on the losing side: licensing Japanese anime-style games stopped working, and it has no bargaining power as a channel for Chinese games. However, as a content platform, it is on the winning side, since everything from Chinese single-player games to unlicensed overseas titles comes to Bilibili to compete for players’ attention.

The platform itself is worth being optimistic about. Advertising and VAS should drive Bilibili’s growth whether its own games work out, and the weakness in games stems from management’s decisions and priorities. With similar traffic, WeChat and Douyin turned their audiences into game revenue through mini-games, a market Bilibili barely takes part in.

Bilibili’s platform format partly explains why it has not leaned into mini-games: long-form videos like reviews, guides, and walkthroughs better promote more complex “heavy” games that players need to understand and study (both San Guo and Duckov fall into this category).

Next up is the upcoming Wangdao Tianxia. Management sees it as complementary to San Guo, but if it draws players away from San Guo without bringing in new ones, betting on a single genre will no longer be hypothetical.

More broadly, while Bilibili has shown it can make hits, it hasn’t recently chosen genres that best fit its platform’s strengths. While we can criticize some of its gaming efforts, it might not matter much. The company has excelled at expanding beyond games, and in an AI-influenced age of endless gaming and content supply, a platform that controls and directs user demand is better positioned to compete. The same lesson should play out in the West, even if the ecosystem of participants is quite different.

Sponsor: The Payments Infrastructure That Nets You More Revenue.

Every failed transaction, false decline, and unresolved dispute is revenue a studio never sees. Appcharge closes those gaps — both on Web Stores and Payment Links that move IAPs off app-store rails.

Playstudios’ MGM Slots Live saw DTC Payment Links alone drive overall game revenue within weeks, and top-grossing titles across genres are seeing similar results.

That scales to $1BN annually, with multi-PSP architecture, local acquiring across 10+ regions, and a smart routing engine that delivers a 96% Order Success Rate and a 0.1% dispute rate, versus an industry standard of 0.83%. Add full Merchant of Record coverage, and partners keep more net revenue from every DTC transaction at scale.

Payments optimized for mobile games are where the real margin lives.

See the payments data

In Other News

Funding and M&A:

• Kazakhstan-based AI consumer apps developer Nomad Venture Studio has secured a UA financing facility of up to $100M
• Cyprus-based investment company Mika Games has raised a second $10M round
• U.S.-based ad-tech company Monetizr has raised $875K of a planned $2m from five undisclosed investors
• South Korea-based indie games developer Concode has secured development funding
• Side expands presence in China, opens new studio and acquires art outsourcing provider Roboto Entertainment

Business & Product:

• Netflix reportedly offered $500M to Microsoft to license Xbox IP for seven years
• Wardogs leads Newzoo’s September PC revenue charts
• Hearth and Hamlet publisher Runic Forge rebrands as Pythia Games
• First Xbox COO Helen Chiang leaves company after three months in the role
• TiMi Studio Group’s Pokémon Unite to shut down on March 23, 2027

Miscellaneous:

• PressEngine announces The Pre-Show, an in-person London showcase for upcoming games
• Ludia CEO Jimmy Gendron weighs in on acquisitions, life after Jam City and mobile’s new reality
• Unity partners with PvX to offer funding for game developers
• UKIE calls on government to modernise Video Games Expenditure Credit ahead of Autumn Budget
• Azra Games CEO Mark Otero on betting $50M on UnGodly and building for iPhone Duo

Content Worth Consuming

“Taking Several Years With Several Thousand People… It’s Almost Impossible” – PlayStation Creator Ken Kutaragi on the Current State of Gaming (gamesindustry.biz): “Middlesbrough is probably the last place we expected to meet Ken Kutaragi, widely known as the father of the PlayStation. He admits he hadn’t heard of the northern UK town before he was invited here to give a talk at the second Game Republic New Horizons event on October 15. But speaking to GamesIndustry.biz after his keynote, he says he’s warmed to it. “I am very amazed. It’s a very, very strange city,” he says. He comments on the town’s industrial past and its newly emerging tech sector, home to studios like Double Eleven, Dink, and Behaviour Interactive. ‘It’s getting on to be a very exciting new industry. Not yet, but small studios are now gathering.’”

“Anyone Can Make a Game Now” — Meta Horizon VP Interview (The Game Business): “This week, we chat to Meta’s VP of Horizon Sax Persson to discuss its new prompt-based game development tools: Horizon Create and Horizon Studio. We discuss the rise of UGC, whether it undermines the traditional game business, whether AI-made games are an opportunity for professionals, and the battle between Meta, Google and Roblox.”

Smilegate’s Harold Kim on Building Long-Lasting IP (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Adam Orth chats with Harold Kim, SVP of Business Development at Smilegate. Together they discuss Smilegate’s portfolio strategy and how that informs what partners they elect to work with; the importance of building rich IP that can stand the test of time; Smilegate’s role in supporting studios and creativity; and his advice on how to successfully pitch a partnership.”

Stop Listening to Your Discord. Watch What Players Do. | Pedro Esparza, Bisect Hosting (GameMakers): “Pedro Esparza, Head of Growth at Bisect Hosting, has spent about 20 years on the business side of game servers (MC Pro Hosting, Tebex, Overwolf). We dig into his community validation loop: how studios can read real demand from what players do instead of what they say, which signals to trust (retention first, Discord size last), and when to build a feature, partner with modders, or leave it alone. We cover Schedule I, RimWorld Together, Skyrim Together, Minecraft, and what a small studio should do on Monday morning when its community builds something it didn’t ship.”

The European Market Volume for Video Games Consumer Spending 2021-2025 (European Audiovisual Observatory): “The report has just been published by the European Audiovisual Observatory, part of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. It marks the first publication of the Observatory in the field of video games and provides the first country-by-country analysis of video game consumer spending across 35 European territories. It highlights clear structural differences across European countries, grouping national markets into three distinct clusters based on platform architecture and on 2025 available data.”

Roblox (RBLX): The Safety is Theater, But the Hit to Virality Is Real (bleeckerstreetresearch.com): “Roblox (RBLX) is a $39 billion gaming platform built on an audience of children. We believe it has become the prisoner of its failings. In October 2024, Hindenburg Research published a report titled “Roblox: Inflated Metrics for Wall Street and a Pedophile Hellscape for Kids.” Media investigations into child safety on the platform followed, along with lawsuits from state attorneys general and more than 100 federal cases. Roblox responded by rebuilding the platform around child safety. It made a facial age check mandatory for chat, sorted every user into one of six age bands, and walled off users under 16 from adults.”

The post Bilibili: From Games to Mega-Platform appeared first on Naavik.