ChinaJoy 2026 Focuses on Playing with AI as Adoption Hits 86% and Competition Intensifies

The 23rd ChinaJoy opened on July 31, 2026, at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, with more than 900 exhibitors and an exhibition area exceeding 140,000 square metres. The official theme was “Playing with AI,” bringing together gaming, esports, hardware, automotive, robotics and AI industries, with AI as a central thread throughout the event. Sun Shoushan, chairman of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association, said at a ChinaJoy forum that the AI adoption rate among domestic game companies has reached 86%, and that more than 10,000 games on Steam are marked as using AI-assisted creation, representing over 8% of all games on the platform. At the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco in March 2026, 105 sessions were dedicated to AI-related topics, up more than 110% from 2025, with nine Chinese studios delivering 27 of those sessions. AI localisation translation now covers all overseas games and 18 languages, with a peak accuracy rate of 95%, while intelligent customer service has been integrated into all games, with a resolution accuracy of 80%. 37 Interactive Entertainment has built a four-layer architecture centred on its self-developed game industry large model “Xiaoqi,” spanning an AI foundation, the “Zhiqi” enterprise knowledge base, the “Zhiqi” agent development platform, and the “Linglingqi” business application suite. The architecture has accumulated over 70 AI capabilities, integrated more than 240 models and AI tools, and built over 600 agents. The AI indie game studio Miaojituo, with six or seven full-time employees, developed “Miaowu Island,” where each cat is an AI agent with its own behaviour, memory and social relationships. The team first built a pixel-art demo in Python using AI-generated art and music in late 2025, completing it in about two weeks. After a month of online player testing, they produced a full Unity version. The team can now iterate a complete game prototype in one to two weeks. Fudan University sophomores Hao Yuqing and Yuan Jingxuan, who had no prior game development experience, created a medieval fantasy narrative game, “The White Day Crown and the Night Raven Cipher. ” The game is divided into chapters with main-line progress values, and AI generates new events or variations of existing events based on the player’s progress and decisions, feeding them into an event queue. AI handled all text, original art and production processes, and the duo went from learning the tools to completing the game in under a month. Li Zhen, a junior computer science student, independently developed a card-based management game called “Chinese Restaurant,” featuring eight major cuisines, more than 170 cards, over 180 dishes, 903 AI-generated assets, and more than 330 voice lines, background music and sound effects. The project took about 200 hours and cost roughly USD 400, mainly from token fees. Li Zhen treats different AI models and tools as distinct “employees” handling code, images, sound effects and voice, with AI models computing in the cloud, requiring no local high-performance workstation. At the Baidu Mianda booth, typing “Make me an open-world pixel-style fighting game” generated a game with a world view, scene interactions, three specialised fighters and four maps in about 20 minutes. Miaojituo’s game development tool has been live for about three months, attracting roughly 15,000 users, half of whom are independent developers and half professional developers. TapTap data shows that in the first half of 2026, the platform added 5,002 playable games, a year-on-year increase of nearly tenfold, with more than 4,000 of them being AI-assisted mini-games. Huang Yimeng, founder of XD and TapTap, said that while the number of games has surged, the player base has not grown at the same pace, severely diluting the exposure and downloads each game receives. Yu Ruichao, vice president of Tencent Interactive Entertainment and chief editor, said at the 2026 China International Digital Entertainment Industry Conference that with the current state of technology and industry, being “the best in a single area” is no longer enough, and comprehensive capabilities are increasingly important.