[“Shadow of the Hero: Sword Debate” Salon Event Concludes Successfully] From Nostalgia to a New Market Segment: The Rise of the Martial Arts and Xianxia Game Genre

In May 2026, Steam officially added two new official tags: “Wuxia” and “Xianxia.”

For developers, this is a matter of traffic acquisition: once platforms begin to recognize wuxia and xianxia as distinct genres, players will have a more direct path to finding these types of games.As of June, the “Wuxia” and “Xianxia” tags on SteamDB already yielded search results for over a hundred related titles—while this number alone does not necessarily indicate a mature market, it at least demonstrates one fact: Wuxia and Xianxia are no longer just isolated titles; they are forming a pool of games that can be indexed by the platform.

An even more noticeable change is taking place on the supply side. According to SteamDB statistics, the number of new games released in 2026 under the “Wuxia” tag has already reached 23, surpassing the 6 released in all of 2025;the number of new games released in 2026 under the “Xianxia” tag has also reached 16, double the total for all of 2025. As these genre tags are being singled out, the supply side is also clearly accelerating.

June 12, Chengdu. At the first “Xia Ying Lun Jian” single-player game developers’ salon, six producers and publishers spent an entire afternoon discussing this very topic: As wuxia and xianxia genres transition from “nostalgic labels within the Chinese-speaking world”into a recognizable, searchable niche on Steam, what steps should developers take to survive in this increasingly crowded market?

Chengdu: A City Where a Single-Player Video Game Cluster Is Taking Shape

“Knights of the Sword” is hosted by Noise Games and co-organized by Yedao Games, Spiral Up Games, and Youcha Club. What makes this event noteworthy isn’t just the event itself, but the fact that it’s taking place in Chengdu.

According to statistics, there are currently 36 companies in Chengdu developing single-player, one-time-purchase games. Titles such as *Battles and Kitchen Smoke*, *The Imperial Guards*, *Temple Gates and Illusions*, and *Next Stop: Jianghu*—the teams behind these outstanding wuxia and xianxia projects are all based here.

This is no coincidence. Over the past decade, Chengdu’s gaming industry has focused primarily on mobile game development, building up a large pool of talent in game design, art, and programming. Once the business model of buy-to-play single-player games was validated by the market, this talent and experience began to shift toward the single-player game sector.More importantly, the cost structure—compared to Beijing and Shanghai—means that Chengdu’s lower labor and office costs provide a longer window for survival for small-to-medium-sized single-player projects, which typically require a 3- to 5-year development cycle and involve teams of 5 to 20 people.

The purpose of bringing these teams together in one room is to address a question they all face: how to survive in this increasingly crowded market.

In his opening remarks, Chen Wen, COO of Yedao Games, explained the origins of “Xia Ying Lun Jian.”He noted that in recent years, Yedao has published wuxia and xianxia-themed titles such as *Yi Jian Feng Yun Jue*, *Zong Men Zhi*, and *Long Yin Li Zhi Chuan*, and has come to increasingly recognize this as the most representative and mature genre within Chinese cultural themes.Spiral Up Games has been hosting the “Oriental Xia Ying Game Week” since last year with the aim of connecting games with players; “Xia Ying Lun Jian,” on the other hand, aims to connect with creators.

He also explained why the inaugural event was held in Chengdu: “This city is home to a large number of outstanding development teams and has produced many impressive wuxia and xianxia works.” Noise has already established an office in Chengdu, and Qingdou, the head of marketing, will be based there permanently; this marks the beginning of a long-term platform.

From Masterpieces to Ecological Convergence

Steam is clearly not a platform that is far removed from Chinese gamers.According to an official Steam survey conducted in May 2026, the combined share of Simplified and Traditional Chinese clients was approximately 23.2%. This means that wuxia and xianxia game genres aren’t starting from scratch to find users, but are instead competing for more targeted entry points on a platform that already has an established Chinese user base.

The value of this approach has been proven by a series of landmark works.

According to SteamDB, *Yi Jian Feng Yun Jue* has 42,292 user reviews, a 93.05% positive rating, and a peak concurrent user count of 22,824. These figures demonstrate that wuxia RPGs can become globally recognized examples of the genre.

“Ghost Valley Eight Deserts” once raised the commercial bar for the cultivation genre on Steam.According to media reports, it sold approximately 3.9 million copies in 2021, generating annual revenue of about 250 million yuan. Its significance lies not merely in its sales figures, but in proving that the entire framework of Chinese fantasy—encompassing “realms, cultivation techniques, serendipity, sects, and extraordinary encounters”—can be understood and embraced by a vast player base.Subsequent titles, such as *In Search of Immortality* and *Xian Simulator*, further advanced the cultivation genre from visual presentation to the level of game mechanics.

By this point, wuxia and xianxia genres on Steam had already taken various paths to success: some developers focused on narrative and the atmosphere of martial arts sects, others on simulating the martial arts world and offering high-degree freedom of choice, while still others pushed the xianxia genre to the level of system-level mechanics.The true sign of a genre’s maturity is precisely its ability to accommodate more than one gameplay approach within the same theme, with each title interpreting the concept of “chivalry” in its own unique way.

Of course, the maturity of a genre shouldn’t be reflected solely in individual products; it should also be evident in the ability to organize events. Take the “Oriental Heroes Game Week” as an example: the inaugural event brought together more than 250 Eastern-style games and garnered over 20 million impressions.For developers of wuxia and xianxia games, this signifies that the genre is shifting from individual efforts toward joint promotion and collaborative user education.

Sherry, Head of Publishing at Noise Games, shared an observation at the salon: the user bases for wuxia, xianxia, cultivation, and supernatural fiction genres overlap significantly, and collaboration among them can lead to mutual benefits, forming a gaming ecosystem where each genre drives growth in the others.She used the term “bro games” to describe this group of titles—they share similar audience profiles, spending habits, and overlapping communities. When a high-quality wuxia game launches, it won’t steal users from xianxia games; rather, it will draw more people into the genre as a whole.

At the same time, Spiral Up Games has been organizing themed events such as the “Touhou Game Week” on Steam to bring together games of this genre and build an ecosystem that benefits more local developers.

From genre labeling to verification of representative works, and from ecosystem integration to event aggregation, wuxia and xianxia are evolving from “nostalgia-driven” genres into a vertical market supported by clear business logic and platform infrastructure.

The Math of Survival in the Indie Game Industry

If the rise of new product categories is good news, then the bad news follows immediately: while the market has expanded, the survival rate has not improved.

Of the more than 20,000 games released on Steam in 2025, less than 5% actually turned a profit.Only 608 titles have received more than 1,000 reviews—which is roughly the minimum threshold for a game to be “noticed by the market.” Forty-nine percent of new games have fewer than 10 reviews, meaning almost no players have tried them, and the “head effect” is extremely brutal.

Qingdou, head of the Noise Games market division, put this reality very bluntly at the salon: “The essence of making games is expressing ideas; the essence of selling games is crunching the numbers.”

His methodology is very specific: he estimates the maximum sales volume based on the category’s size and the performance of similar products, and then sets the break-even point at half of the estimated sales volume—or even lower.This may seem conservative, but it allows for room to make mistakes. High expectations create a chain reaction of pressure—production timelines, wish lists, positive review rates, marketing budgets, public opinion management, and more—and every single aspect is magnified.

His analysis of the key stages in the Steam release process is based on practical experience. From the public store page, first reveal, demo, new releases event, to the official launch date, each stage has clear metrics for evaluation and decision-making windows.He offers this insight: “After the first reveal, you can generally see a game’s development trajectory,” and cautions against releasing an unfinished store page or demo too early just for short-term exposure. On a platform where 55 new games are released every day, you only have one chance for that “first reveal.”

For genres like wuxia and xianxia—which attract a lot of attention but are subject to stricter review standards—the pressure to achieve a high rating upon release is particularly intense. “Veteran fans” will have higher expectations for you, which in turn leads to harsher criticism.

Finding Your Niche on a Crowded Track

If survival is Level 1, then positioning is Level 0—it’s determined at the project initiation stage and dictates how far you can go.

Joey, the producer of *Mountain Gate and the Illusionary Realm*, opened his presentation by sharing the game’s track record: over 230,000 copies sold, a top-10 spot on the global bestseller list, and cumulative sales exceeding $2 million.He then brought the conversation back to the moment the project was greenlit—how did a small team manage to carve out a niche for itself in the cultivation genre, a space that seems vast but has an extremely high failure rate?

His core insight was an assessment of “players’ underlying expectations”: what users of cultivation-themed games truly want is “to rebuild a sect, establish a school, refine elixirs and forge artifacts, and ascend from mortality.”These expectations are perfectly captured by the closed-loop mechanics of simulation management gameplay. Therefore, he abandoned the idea of creating a generic RPG to compete head-on with the multitude of similar titles and instead took an unconventional approach by developing a highly differentiated cross-genre concept: “a cultivation simulation management game from the sect leader’s perspective.”

The case of *Mountain Gate and the Illusionary Realm* illustrates that small teams can certainly enter the popular genre space, but they shouldn’t do so by taking the most crowded route. Breaking down the core expectations of cultivation game users and then incorporating them into a simulation management game—that is the true value of this project.This methodology can be distilled into Joey’s summary: “Ideas don’t have to be earth-shattering; cross-pollination is innovation.”

Wu Di, the producer of *The Legend of the Wandering Sword*, answered the same question from a different perspective.His 60-page PowerPoint presentation was the most information-packed talk of the day, systematically explaining where the “wuxia flavor” comes from—from the narrative foundation (secret manuals, martial arts sects, chivalry), the cultural layer (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism; poetry; values),, character progression design (over 300 martial arts skills and school combinations), and music (47 original tracks, rated 9.7 on NetEase Cloud Music), to the HD-2D art pipeline—all of which collectively form a complete experience.

He offered a practical piece of advice for creators: “First, make sure it’s ‘popular’; then, create something ‘refined.’”First, meet the basic expectations of the genre, then infuse it with your own unique expression. This avoids the two most common pitfalls: “refined” work that only the creator enjoys but no one buys, and “mainstream” work that merely piles on elements without a soul, so no one remembers it.

The Value of Truth

In an online environment flooded with success-oriented content, people who are willing to analyze their failures in detail are a rare resource.

Jiang Zebiao, the producer of *Zongmen Zhi*, delivered a presentation consisting of only nine PowerPoint slides, but his candor was perhaps the most striking of the day.*Zongmen Zhi* was greenlit in 2021; the team grew from 2 to 14 members, and the game launched in Early Access (EA) in 2025, garnering over 2,100 reviews with a 60% approval rating—the moment I heard “EA,” I knew this was going to be a story of “paying a steep learning curve.”

He summarized four pitfalls, each pointing to common blind spots in independent developers’ thinking: underestimating the systemic damage bugs inflict on player immersion (developers are too familiar with the game themselves to notice);a content framework that’s spread too thin, leaving only an empty shell in the later stages; a system that’s so overloaded it prevents players from establishing self-driven goals; and overly aggressive technology choices, such as real-time combat combined with 3D procedurally generated maps, which consume too much of the limited resources available.

His core insight can be distilled into a single principle: the core experience of a single-player game is to enable players to quickly establish “self-driven goals.” Any factor that disrupts this process—bugs, system overload, or hollow content—erodes the player’s patience.

Why is this kind of sharing more valuable at an in-person salon than online? Because a post-project review isn’t a textbook—it requires a specific context. When you hear a game producer say face-to-face, “If I had to do it over, I’d choose turn-based combat over real-time combat,” you can feel the weight of those five years behind that decision. It’s a concrete choice that came at a cost.

Long-Term Thinking and Market Prosperity

The title of the talk given by “Pangzi,” the producer of the *Next Stop: Jianghu* series, was “Stick to the Same Path Until the End,” which reads more like the survival philosophy of a long-term thinker.

His core logic is this: Perseverance comes from genuine passion, and iteration builds momentum like a snowball—”three years to build the factory, five years to start production.” An ordinary team must plan its costs carefully; technology is the core competitive advantage.

But what holds the greatest significance for the industry is his perspective on “mutual prosperity in the market”: in the single-player content market, companies should view one another as partners. He drew an analogy with Chengdu’s Taikoo Li—brands should not compete for the same customers, but rather work together to expand and strengthen the overall customer base.Single-player games differ from MMOs or esports in that they do not need to monopolize users’ attention; instead, they simply aim to provide high-quality entertainment value to users during specific periods.

When viewed within the context of the wuxia and xianxia verticals, this assessment carries profound practical significance. In the first half of 2026 alone, 23 new games were tagged with “wuxia” and 16 with “xianxia.” “Market co-prosperity”——means that products within the same genre can educate users about one another, drive traffic to each other, and collectively validate the commercial viability of the genre. Every well-made independent wuxia or xianxia game contributes to expanding the user base for the genre.

After the Sword Tournament

Looking back on this afternoon, the “Knights of the Sword” event was packed with information.

This reflects the structural changes that the wuxia and xianxia genres have undergone: With Steam offering tag certification, supply-side growth accelerated significantly in 2026, and landmark titles demonstrated commercial viability,ecosystem-wide collaboration mechanisms have begun to take shape, and Chengdu has become a hub for numerous small development teams—yet at the same time, the intensity of competition has not diminished, and most indie games continue to struggle to survive.

What “Xia Ying Lun Jian” is doing is establishing a mechanism for information flow within this Chengdu cluster. From project planning and positioning to distribution and financial analysis, to navigating pitfalls and avoiding risks—these issues have become topics that everyone can sit down and discuss.

A sword duel isn’t about winning or losing; it’s a friendly exchange—and, more than anything, a way to connect with one another.

The first “Xia Ying Lun Jian” event has come to a close. Now that Steam has created separate tags for “wuxia” and “xianxia,” and with titles such as *Yi Jian Feng Yun Jue**Chronicles of the Sect*, *Mountain Gates and Illusory Realms*, and *Next Stop: Jianghu* have already established a substantial data set on the platform, the discussions at this Chengdu salon went far beyond the simple question of “what genres do we like?” This marks a noteworthy milestone for the entire xianxia and wuxia gaming sector.