Why Xiaohongshu has become harder for game marketers to ignore

A $60B Vote of Confidence

Xiaohongshu's community dynamics can help smaller titles turn authenticity into attention. Chinese game publishers with limited marketing budgets often face a difficult choice when promoting a new title: HeyBox, Bilibili, or Xiaohongshu? At first glance, many people would call the comparison unfair. It is like asking which team is most likely to win the FIFA World Cup and including China's men's national soccer team among the contenders. Compared with HeyBox and Bilibili, Xiaohongshu barely seems to belong in the conversation. On what grounds should it even be considered? That skepticism is not unfounded. HeyBox got its start during the early boom of PUBG: Battlegrounds. It later built a large gaming user base through services such as data lookup, social features, and game sales, pulling ahead of comparable rivals. It also has the most mature integrated marketing pipeline among the three. Within the app, a game can move through the full cycle from exposure to search to conversion. Bilibili, meanwhile, is familiar to most Chinese internet users. It began with anime and ACG, an abbreviation for animation, comics, and games, and has since accumulated a large base of broader internet users. Bilibili entered the games market by jointly operating titles such as Guns GirlZ (also known as Houkai Gakuen 2). Later, its operation of titles including Fate/Grand Order and Azur Lane brought in substantial revenue. In indie games, it has released titles such as Dead Cells and Warm Snow, while its in-house studio launched the indie hit Escape from Duckov in 2025. Bilibili World, the convention it organizes, has also become one of China's top offline exposure channels for games, allowing for more targeted promotion. Escape from Duckov promotion at Bilibili World 2026. Photo source: 36Kr. By comparison, Xiaohongshu does not appear to have much history in game marketing. It does not have an obvious gaming pedigree, and even its apparent algorithmic advantage has come under pressure in recent years. Yet, many games have benefited from marketing on Xiaohongshu. Take Caiji Mengxiangjia, which has surpassed 460,000 preregistrations on TapTap, according to the draft's figures. The project was originally initiated because the team's 'Xiao Caiji' IP character became popular on Xiaohongshu. After formal R&D began in 2023, its posts averaged more than 100,000 views. Smaller products that once lacked exposure channels and marketing budgets have also found target players on Xiaohongshu. Huolongguo, an indie game producer, once shared such an experience: since his game's first reveal in 2024, he has handled marketing himself across Xiaohongshu, HeyBox, and Bilibili. Unexpectedly, according to his own figures, most of the players he eventually attracted came from Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu's own team has also continued to maintain and build its game-related business system in recent years. According to platform figures cited in the draft, a topic created in 2023 for game developers on Xiaohongshu has accumulated 1.85 billion views. In 2025, the platform held its first RedLand convention, with a venue spanning more than 80,000 square meters and 3.9 billion impressions across the internet. Preparations for the next edition are underway. According to data released by Xiaohongshu, searches for game-related terms on the platform increased 70% year-on-year. Annual game searches grew by more than 70%, game-related content posts rose 147%, and annual watch time for game live streams climbed 250%. As of 2025, the monthly active users of game-related communities had exceeded 120 million. Judged by past data and platform capabilities, Xiaohongshu has likely become a marketing channel that game industry practitioners can no longer ignore. It is not necessarily inferior to several other frequently discussed platforms, and it has found a distinctive source of competitiveness in this field. Xiaohongshu began as a product seeding platform, and recommending games fits naturally within that model. After years of operation, many Xiaohongshu posts now feel more human and trustworthy. For a time, some internet users treated Xiaohongshu as an alternative to Baidu. A trusted platform is a useful place for products to conduct content marketing and community operations. Games are no exception. For game marketing specifically, Xiaohongshu also has clear advantages, including relatively low barriers and lower costs. Compared with other platforms, video-heavy platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin concentrate users' emotions and attention on dynamic content. Creators who want players to remember them often need to keep publishing high-quality videos, while view counts can become a core indicator players use to judge product quality. On HeyBox, products that do not have deep collaboration with the platform may receive relatively limited exposure and lack stronger algorithmic promotion that directly reaches users. For products with mature operations teams and marketing strategies, adding Xiaohongshu to the mix can be a useful extra step. If teams synchronize prepared materials to Xiaohongshu, they may be able to generate discussion and decent results, even when the content consists only of images and text. Indie game developers feel this point more strongly. Most indie developers wear multiple hats. Beyond development, it is difficult for them to invest additional resources in marketing and operations. For them, the optimal solution is often to hand these tasks to a publisher. But not every team has the chance to sign with one, and not every product receives sufficient publishing resources. A producer known as Qie'e Jingcha regularly shares game progress. Because her time and energy are limited, she mostly uses image-and-text posts. Once she finishes them, she publishes them and waits for the results. She has found that Xiaohongshu's algorithmic promotion can be more effective than that of other platforms. She has also found that Xiaohongshu's community dynamics can help her game gain more visibility and attract more players. In the end, Xiaohongshu's unique advantages in game marketing have made it a marketing channel that game industry practitioners can no longer ignore.