China flexes at GamesCom – by Stephen Totilo

On Aug 25, 2026

A two-hour showcase for upcoming games in Germany today may have ended with segments dedicated to works from top studios in Japan (Final Fantasy VII Retribution out next spring) and Poland (A remaster of Witcher 3 out September 29; an expansion out next year). But it was Chinese game studios that showed up the most.

Opening the show was Nodusfall, a newly revealed co-op action game from Hoyoverse, part of Shanghai-based miHoYo (see trailer above). The new game trades the anime art style used in the company’s Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail games for a darker, detailed dark fantasy look, more akin to FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.

Hoyoverse also showed a new trailer for cozy Animal Crossing style game Petit Planet.

Early in the Opening Night Live showcase came a January 15 release date reveal for Ananta, an open-world city-based action game from Hangzhou-based Naked Rain, a subsidiary of Chinese giant NetEase. The hook for this one is that you play as a world-saving social media influencer.

ONL also featured Tides of Annihilation, an upcoming PC, PS5, Xbox action-adventure game involving a ruined London and Arthurian legend, from Chengdu-based Eclipse Glow Games.

From Shanghai-based TiGames came a trailer for Zoopunk, a co-op action game featuring armored anthropomorphized rhinos and chipmunks battling robots. TiGames’ prior release, 2021’s F.I.S.T., had been part of PlayStation’s China Hero Project, an effort to incubate Chinese studios and help them transition into console development.

Chinese studio Hoothanes showed a new trailer for The Defiant, a first-person shooter set on Chinese battlefields during World War II.

The wildest Chinese game shown? Probably Showa American Story, from Wuhan-based Nekcom. The game, per a press release, is a “post-apocalyptic RPG set in an alternate 1980s, [in which] Japan has bought out most of the United States, transforming it into a familiar-yet-strangely-unique backdrop to a zombie outbreak.”

If that wasn’t enough of a trend, even Ubisoft’s reveal of a 2027 console/PC remake for Heroes of Might and Magic III had a Chinese twist. The Paris-headquartered company said the remake’s development is being led by Ubisoft’s China studios in Chengdu and Shanghai.

(And there were more: Aniimo from Hangzhou-based Paw Print, Genigods: Nezha from Genigods Lab, Roco Kingdom from Shenzen-based, Tencent-owned Morefun, Sea of Remnants from Guangzhou-based, NetEase-owned Joker Studio)

What to make of this?

Chinese studios aren’t a monolith, aren’t sticking to one genre (we’ve got fantasy action, sure, but also a WWII shooter!), nor one visual style. And they’ve gone well beyond sticking to mobile, with most of these games lined up for some combo of PC and console. Key context to this is that the Chinese-backed games shown were developed by China-based studios; as opposed to coming from the many western studios that the likes of Tencent and NetEase set up in the past several years only to then start shutting down or selling off, bit by bit.

Ubisoft’s Rainbow 6 Tactics is a 2027-slated top-down tactics game (read: kinda like XCOM)
Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, from Inscryption developer Daniel Mullins, got an incredible genre-mash-up trailer and an April 27 2027 release date.
Paradox Interactive’s next grand strategy game is Afterworld, a game about tribes of people trying to survive and rebuild in post-apocalyptic North America. (Paradox is also publishing a Lego-based city-building game, Lego Skylines).
Exodus, the Mass Effect-looking sci-fi game from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro got an April 7 release date, which is particularly noteworthy given this will be the first of what was meant to be a wave of internally-developed big-budget games. That follows years of planning and some recent pullback. Montreal-developed Warlock got a gameplay reveal, too.

“This game looks super fun” – said during the trailer for Ubisoft’s Rayman Legends remake. (Followed by him asking me if the original game was in black and white)
“Daddy, Metro!” – said when he heard the show’s host tee up a segment for the next game in the grim first-person shooter series Metro. I didn’t think he knew about Metro. When I asked why he was excited, he said: “Because of Samus. Didn’t you just play one of those games?”

💧 GTA leaks update:

The leaker is up to 14 leaks (was at six as of Friday afternoon)
Publisher Take Two is seeking to subpoena YouTube and X for information tied to the leak, though the X accounts requested have been flagged by the GTA community as imposters, TorrentFreak reports.
Discord marketing director Ryan Rigney (whose retired gaming newsletter had long been recommended to Game File readers before he was at Discord) said the company has not yet been served with Take Two’s court-approved subpoena and that “when we do, we’ll evaluate the validity and scope before responding.”

👀 Nintendo has announced two upcoming Switch 2 bundles to take the edge of a long-planned price increase hitting the console on September 1 in the U.S., Canada and Europe (old price: $450; new $500).

A new Mario Kart World bundle will retail for $550 starting in late September; a bundle including Switch Sports Resort will launch for $530 when the game comes out on October 22.
The difference in bundle prices is due to Kart normally costing more than Sports ($80 vs. $50) and the former getting a bigger discount.

🎣 Steam’s latest hit: How To Fish, a physics-based multiplayer comedy fishing game with a lot of shooting, too.

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