MyGamez on why co-publishing could be your way into China

• MyGamez CEO Mikael Leinonen told PGC Summit Shanghai that China is the biggest growth opportunity for most global developers, yet still largely untapped by overseas studios.
• His pitch is co-publishing, keeping the original developer operating the game while a local partner handles China expertise, rather than handing over the source code.
• He stressed long-term thinking, transparency and developer control, arguing there are "no easy wins" in China.

"China is probably the biggest growth opportunity for most of the global game developers who have successful games."

That was MyGamez co-founder and CEO Mikael Leinonen at last year's Pocket Gamer Connects Summit Shanghai, opening a keynote aimed squarely at overseas developers eyeing the Chinese market. We'll be back, along with MyGamez, for PGC Summit Shanghai 2026 on July 29th.

The prize is enormous - China accounts for "around 30% of the global gaming revenues", he said. "And yet the market is largely untapped by overseas developers."

It is also famously hard to crack. Entering China successfully has "largely been quite difficult", Leinonen acknowledged, but he argued things are "getting gradually better", with a growing wave of interest from developers abroad.

Below are some key takeaways from the talk.

The scale of the prize

To illustrate the size of the opportunity, he pointed to Fingersoft's Hill Climb Racing, a Finnish game MyGamez has published in China since 2014.

Between them, Hill Climb Racing 1 and 2 have racked up "over 700 million downloads in China Android market alone" - a figure he offered as "a pretty good understanding of the scale of opportunity here".

MyGamez does not make its own games. It is "100% just focused on bringing overseas games to the market", he said, working with Western developers including Fingersoft, Playrix and Nexters to localise their titles for Chinese audiences.

What co-publishing actually means

There are several ways into China, Leinonen explained: sell your game to a Chinese publisher, sell your company or license operations to a local partner. But one thing is non-negotiable - there must be a Chinese publishing partner, by regulation.

MyGamez calls its model co-publishing because, he said, it keeps the developer "heavily" involved in the China operation. His reasoning is that modern free-to-play games are complex operations and handing one to a brand-new team in another country rarely works.

"The original developer," he argued - the people who built the game and scaled it globally, are "always the best teams to operate the game".

Keep your game, keep your IP

Handing over your source code is risky on two fronts, Leinonen warned: commercially, there are "very small chances of truly succeeding" when someone else runs your game and it leaves your IP exposed.

MyGamez's model instead has the developer keep and operate the game while it supplies "the local expertise, the local operations" needed to make it work.

He was candid that none of this is free. "Coming to China always requires investment," he said. "There are no easy wins here" - to succeed, "you have to put in effort… time and some money." 

Think in decades, not quarters

Leinonen's other theme was patience. "There's no point," he said, "to come to China with one year or two years in mind."

MyGamez frames its work around partnerships of "five years, 10 years, 20 years", delivered as a modular package of services so partners are not renegotiating a fresh deal for every title.

Underpinning all of it, he said, is trust and transparency: developers stay "in full control" of their IP, see "all the real-time revenues and all the metrics", and keep the final say on what happens to their game in the market.

See it firsthand at PGC Shanghai 2026

Leinonen's keynote was part of PGC Shanghai's 2025 debut. The event returns on July 29th, again positioned just ahead of ChinaJoy week as a one-day gateway between the Chinese and global games markets - and MyGamez, the summit's partner, will have its team on the ground.

Get your tickets here.