TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet:
- TikTok Live brings in over half of all viewership for the top 10 Chinese-published games
- South East Asian audiences are the biggest supporters of Chinese-published games, mainly due to the overwhelming popularity of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang esports
- Newer releases show promise for exported titles in big franchises, with Marvel Rivals’ December 2024 release being a key recent example
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Chinese publishers are everywhere on live-streaming: Tencent has grown from a MOBA powerhouse into the studio trusted to build Call of Duty: Mobile. NetEase has gone from a domestic giant to the developer behind Marvel’s newest hero shooter. Western publishers have increasingly turned to Chinese studios to develop and localize some of their biggest franchises for mobile. The results speak for themselves: Some of these titles now rank among the most-watched games in the world.
That growth has extended into live-streaming too, where Chinese-published titles now command massive audiences across TikTok Live, YouTube, Twitch, and Kick, a reflection of these publishers branching out into markets far beyond China thanks to globally recognized IP. In this article, we’re looking at the top 10 Chinese-published games by hours watched in H1 2026, from mobile giants like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and PUBG Mobile to premium releases like Genshin Impact and Where Winds Meet, to see how they perform across platforms, creators, and regions.
Chinese Publishers Dominate Live-Streaming, But The Gap Between Them Is Massive
To find the biggest Chinese-published games on live-streaming in H1 2026, we pulled the top 10 by hours watched across all platforms. The range is enormous: Mobile Legends: Bang Bang led with 628M hours watched, down to Where Winds Meet‘s 17M, a 37X difference within the same top 10. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang alone out-watched the bottom seven titles combined, proof of just how much scale mobile MOBAs and Battle Royales command compared to premium open-world RPGs and extraction shooters. PUBG Mobile (459M) and Arena of Valor (147M) round out the mobile heavy-hitters, while Call of Duty: Mobile‘s 84M lands near the bottom despite being a recognizable Western IP.
TikTok Live’s role in this sample is not evenly distributed, but where it matters, it matters enormously. Call of Duty: Mobile pulled a striking 92% of its hours watched from TikTok Live, with Arena of Valor (65%), PUBG Mobile (64%), and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (60%) all close behind, echoing how heavily ML:BB and Honor of Kings‘ esports audiences concentrate in Asia. For mobile-first titles, TikTok Live functions as the primary stage rather than a supplementary channel. Compare that to Genshin Impact (15%), Delta Force (20%), or Arknights: Endfield (1%): The more console- and PC-adjacent a game is, the less it depends on TikTok.
Creators Outside TikTok Live Skew Toward A Different Set Of Winners
Turning our gaze beyond TikTok Live, the scale gap among top creators is just as steep. PUBG Mobile‘s NoorGamer led with 16.4M hours watched, followed by Mobile Legends: Bang Bang‘s set1awanade at 13.2M, a familiar name from ML:BB‘s esports scene. From there, the numbers fall off: Marvel Rivals‘ Jay3 (4.2M) posted less than a third of set1awanade’s total, and every creator after him sits under 2.6M. Call of Duty: Mobile‘s top creator, Noah Sunday, closed out the list at just 235K, in line with the game’s 92% TikTok reliance: Take TikTok away, and there’s barely an audience left.
The regional spread among these top creators is remarkably wide. Iraq’s NoorGamer, Indonesia’s set1awanade, Vietnam’s BLV Thanh Tùng, Japan’s Mariko Honda, and creators from the US and Australia all lead completely different games, spanning Asia, Oceania, North America, and MENA. Arabic-speaking creators lead two separate titles, NoorGamer on PUBG Mobile and Amirko on Where Winds Meet, both on Kick, consistent with Kick’s dominance among Arabic and Turkish-speaking audiences. YouTube shows up for every single game’s top creator in some form, while Kick carves out a foothold specifically among PUBG Mobile, Delta Force, and Arena Breakout: Infinite, hinting at where competitive shooter audiences are increasingly showing up (though Where Winds Meet is an outlier here).
Twitch Skews English And Russian, While YouTube Appeals to Southeast Asia
That regional spread mirrors a broader split in where these games’ audiences live. Twitch and YouTube track viewership differently, language for the former and country for the latter, so we split this graphic to give each platform a fair read. On Twitch, English dominates at 60.1% of hours watched across these 10 games, unsurprising given the platform’s Western user base. What’s more notable is Russian sitting at 17.7%, a distant but clear second and far ahead of Spanish (4.9%) or Portuguese (3.6%). That gap points to a notably engaged Russian-speaking audience for these Chinese-published titles on Twitch specifically, distinct from the Southeast Asian skew we see once we turn to YouTube.
YouTube’s country breakdown leans heavily Southeast Asian by comparison: Indonesia leads at 32.0%, with Vietnam (9.8%), Thailand (8.9%), and Malaysia (7.1%) all cracking the top tier alongside the U.S. (7.4%). The Philippines shows up further down the full list too, reinforcing just how much of this audience sits in SEA. About a quarter of YouTube’s hours watched carry no assigned country at all, so these percentages reflect only the portion we can confidently attribute. Even with that caveat, the SEA concentration here stands in sharp contrast to Twitch’s English-and-Russian-led audience.
Chinese-Published Games Hit Their Ceiling When Marvel Rivals And Delta Force Launched Together
Zooming out to monthly hours watched for the full sample from January 2022 to June 2026 shows exactly when this footprint surged hardest. December 2024, when Marvel Rivals and Delta Force launched a day apart, pushed the sample to 196.1M hours watched, the highest month in the entire four-and-a-half-year window. Marvel Rivals did most of the heavy lifting on its own, pulling in 20M hours watched in just its first week. That launch’s single week represents roughly 10% of the entire month’s total across all 10 titles combined. January 2025 stayed elevated too at 180.5M, as both games carried their momentum into a full calendar month.
The only spike that “rivals” December 2024 (pun intended) came this year when Arknights: Endfield launch coincided with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang‘s M7 World Championship, the most-watched mobile esports tournament ever. New releases and major esports moments are reliable lifts in viewership here, not gradual month-to-month growth. Smaller spikes are also seen for live-streaming activations, like Where Winds Meet‘s recent Hexi expansion and associated content drops.
Outside these spikes, hours watched settle back toward the 122.3M average, sometimes dipping to the 62-65M lows seen in early 2024. That pattern suggests the category’s baseline health depends less on any one game’s staying power and more on a steady drumbeat of fresh content and events across the group. That’s good for making headlines, but not so encouraging for the long-term health of this sample of games.
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This sample makes one thing clear: Chinese-published games dominate live-streaming, but they do it through completely different playbooks. Mobile-first titles lean almost entirely on TikTok Live and Southeast Asian YouTube audiences, while premium releases like Genshin Impact and Where Winds Meet build broader footprints that extend into Twitch and YouTube’s Western and MENA communities.
It could help for these publishers to copy each others’ notes: Mobile MOBAs could take cues from premium titles’ platform diversification to reduce their TikTok dependence, while premium releases could learn from mobile games’ regional creator strategies to deepen their reach into markets like MENA and Southeast Asia. As more Chinese publishers pursue globally-recognized IP, blending these approaches could be the difference between a strong regional hit and a game with staying power.
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