On December 11, local time, TGA 2025 (The Game Awards), known as the "Oscars of the gaming industry", was held as scheduled. The awards are widely known for their popularity and rich content. At this ceremony, the domestic 3A masterpiece "Shadow Blade Zero" released a new promotional video and officially announced that it will be released on September 9, 2026, and is expected to be launched on PS, PC and other platforms.
As of now, the store page of "Shadow Blade Zero" has been launched simultaneously on Steam, Epic and other platforms. According to the store page, this work is a dark martial arts action-adventure game created by the Unreal 5 engine. According to the official description, players will play the role of a "swordsman with a severely damaged heart" in the game, fighting against various enemies in the remaining time of his life.
Overall, the market’s expectations for “Shadow Blade Zero” are quite high. Feng Ji, the producer of "Black Myth: Wukong", once forwarded a live demonstration video of the work in his circle of friends and publicly expressed his support. In addition, the work was nominated for the "Best Sound Effects Award" at the opening night of Gamescom 2025 (ONL) held not long ago.
The market has considerable expectations for "Shadow Blade Zero" to appear in TGA. Last week, the game's producer Liang Qiwei posted on Weibo, with a picture showing the destination as Los Angeles and the text "Going on a short trip for a few days." In fact, he was planning to go to the TGA site in advance.
Public information shows that the producer of "Shadow Blade Zero" is Beijing Lingyoufang Software Technology Co., Ltd. (S-GAME), and its story is based on the earliest stand-alone series of Liang Qiwei's career, "Rainblood: Dead Town". In 2013, Lingyoufang tried to complete its transformation into a mobile game manufacturer, and the "Shadow Blade" series was born.
In 2021, after Lingyoufang launched its last mobile game "Shadow Blade 3", the company accepted hundreds of millions of investments from Tencent and officially returned to the field of stand-alone games.
In recent years, domestic stand-alone games have frequently produced commercial masterpieces: first, "Black Myth: Wukong" set a record of 400,000 people online at the same time on Steam on the day of its release. Later, "Ming Dynasty: The Feather of Yuanxu" accumulated sales exceeding 2.95 million copies, or achieving an operating income of over 700 million yuan. At this year's Gamescom, many products including "Black Myth: Zhong Kui" and "Ancient Sword" were unveiled.
Thinking back to when "Black Myth: Wukong" was first released last year, Michael Douse, publishing director of the internationally renowned game studio Larian, predicted that the huge success of this work would pave the way for Chinese studios to produce a large number of big-budget games. 80% of today’s gamers are in China.In the future, China will also develop a series of 3A-level game projects for the international market..
Now this expectation has partially turned into reality: at the just-held TGA 2025, a large number of domestic stand-alone games appeared. "Arknights: The End" released its latest PV, NetEase's Mingyue Studio released a new game "Gang of Dragon", and "Dark Horse", the largest single-player game with sales exceeding 3 million copies this year, "Escape from Duckkov" also showed the latest game content.
In April this year, Ling Ji, Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy Representative for International Trade Negotiations, stated at a press conference that the "Comprehensive Pilot Work Plan for Accelerating the Expansion and Opening-up of the Service Industry" clearly stated that it is necessary to develop the overseas game business and promote the layout of the entire industry chain from IP creation to game production, distribution and overseas operations.
Compared with Europe, the United States, and Japan, China's game industry started late, and there was a gap in R&D and production capabilities. However, CMB Research believes that domestic 3A masterpieces have now entered the era of batch development. In the global market, game quality is always the core factor that determines the success of a product, and "fun" will always be the "universal language" of players around the world. In the future, "competitive products" with high-quality mobile and PC games as the core will continue to expand overseas markets and have a long-term impact on the development of the global game industry.