Shanghai's Levelup Games Bets on Wuxia and British Horror to Take Chinese Titles Global

Levelup Games works out of an office on a Shanghai street, but its ambitions reach well beyond the city. The publisher was founded in 2024 and divides its roughly dozen team members between Shanghai and Los Angeles, giving it a two-city footprint on both sides of the Pacific.

Its two most prominent bets sit at opposite ends of the cultural map: a wuxia sandbox cult classic, The Scroll of Taiwu, and a British fairy-tale horror game. The pairing reflects the studio's approach to moving titles across borders rather than confining them to a single market.

The genres Levelup is pursuing will be familiar to followers of China's indie gaming scene — pixel art, simulation, city-builders and cozy RPGs. These are categories that rarely dominate headlines, but they sustain some of the most committed communities on platforms including Bilibili, Steam and Xiaohongshu.

The company is also drawing on outside creative help, with a two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker advising on narrative. The studio has not disclosed the adviser's name.

What Levelup is attempting is a problem that has stalled companies with far larger budgets: getting audiences outside China to engage with Chinese-made games without the conversation collapsing into censorship stories, soft-power commentary or comparisons to Tencent. By the source's own account, the studio has not fully cracked it, and neither has anyone else.