October’s 195 Game Licenses, Broken Down by Structure: 12 Imported Titles Set a Yearly High, Cross-Platform Filings Become Standard Practice#

On October 29, 2026, the National Press and Publication Administration released the October 2026 online game approval information; this batch was approved on October 28: 183 domestic online games, 12 imported online games, plus approval information changed for 10 games.

Taken alone, the total of “195 titles” makes the October batch look uneventful — a little fewer than September, a little more than most months in the first half, sitting inside the normal range. But treated as a structural sample and taken apart, the signal density is actually fairly high: imported licenses set a new monthly high for the year; dual-platform filings for mobile and client moved from an experimental move by top-tier publishers to routine practice among a batch of mid-tier ones; and on the theme side, xianxia and cultivation settings showed clear clustering.

Last month’s September batch was already covered in full on this site in September’s 209 Licenses Issued: miHoYo’s Primordial Knot Approved and the “No Character Gacha” Signal for the Anime-Style Game Track. This piece is the second installment of the monthly license series, and its angle is deliberately distinct from last month’s: rather than revolving around a single product, it treats the month’s list as a slice of industry structure, looking at composition, at month-on-month movement, and at monthly changes in filing form.

First, the information boundary: every figure and product list in this article comes from the authority’s October 29 release and from public reporting by Nanfang+, NetEase Games Daily, 18183 and other outlets; where individual figures differ in scope, this article lists both side by side and labels them, without picking one or averaging them; all content involving trend judgment is analysis, kept strictly separate from verified facts.

1. Total and Month-on-Month: The Scissor Gap Between a Domestic Retreat and an Import Surge#

Start with the basics.

Now put the two timelines of month-on-month movement and year-to-date cumulative totals together:

Put these two tables together and the most interesting contrast in this batch comes out: the domestic line retreats while the import line surges.

The domestic line fell from 206 titles in September to 183, a month-on-month drop of 23 titles or about 11.2% — a normal pullback after a run of high-volume issuance. But pull the lens back and NetEase Games Daily offers a frame of reference: from January to September, domestic licenses averaged about 169 per month, and October’s 183 still sits clearly above that monthly average. In other words, this month did not keep pushing volume, but it did not fall off the plateau either — NetEase Games Daily and 18183 agree: license issuance has entered a “normalization plateau period,” no longer chasing volume month by month, but with no interruption either.

The import line tells a story in the opposite direction entirely. Per the Nanfang+ and NetEase Games Daily tally, this batch’s 12 imported licenses set a new monthly high for the year. One thing to flag: “new monthly high for the year” is a media tally, and the reports do not include a month-by-month breakdown for January through September; the hard data available for comparison is the year-to-date cumulative of 58 imported titles — under the usual “small quantities, frequent batches” pattern of import license issuance, 12 in a single month is a quite striking level of clearance.

Domestic steady, imports rising: this scissor gap is the most record-worthy structural signal in this batch. Once domestic supply enters a plateau period, the regulatory side has instead become more generous with its release cadence for imported products. Whether that comes down to approval resources, market expectations, or product pipelines is something the list itself cannot answer, but the change in cadence is already enough to write into a monthly observation.

2. Category Structure: Mobile as the Base, and the Details of the Dual-Platform Scope Need Watching#

The category composition of the 183 domestic titles is as follows (Nanfang+ tally):

There are two scope details in this table that must be spelled out, or the data will be read wrong.

The first is the two ways of splitting the mobile total. Nanfang+ splits mobile into two separately listed blocks, “Mobile 118” and “Mobile - casual puzzle 48”; the Guangdong Game Industry Association’s tally is “mobile-side 166 (including 48 casual puzzle).” Both sets of figures point to the same total, and the difference lies only in how it is split — the former lifts casual puzzle out of the mobile category and lists it separately, the latter counts it merged. Either split is fine to use when writing or citing, but they cannot be mixed.

The second is the scope conflict over the number of dual-platform products. Nanfang+ counts “mobile and client” at 13, while 18183 counts “14 dual-platform products in total.” Two authoritative sources differ by one title, and which boundary the difference falls on, or what scope each tally adopted, is not explained in the public reporting. Following writing discipline, this article presents both side by side without taking a middle value, and the specific attribution is subject to the authority’s original list. This detail also serves as a reminder: when relaying license data, a vague “about this many titles” is actually more honest than a figure precise to the unit but of unclear provenance.

The structure of the 12 imported titles is relatively simple:

Per Nanfang+ and NetEase Games Daily, what makes the import list worth watching is its structure: mobile is still the mainstay, but the weight of client-form products has risen markedly — “mobile and client” plus client-only together account for five slots, a distribution that looks unusual against the overall cadence of import licenses this year. Import approval has long favored mature mobile products, and for this batch to leave such a share for client-form products is a scope change worth tracking continuously.

Two “minority” entries also deserve a mention: one mobile-and-web dual-platform filing, and this batch’s only console-category product, Yuedong Yuanqiji. Console-category products do not appear very often in monthly lists, and although this batch has only one, its very presence is a signal about the breadth of approval coverage.

3. Theme and Publisher Observations: Xianxia Clustering, a Pile-Up of Management Sims, and the Absence of Original Flagships#

If category structure is the skeleton, theme distribution is the muscle of this batch. Three phenomena in NetEase Games Daily’s tally deserve separate listing.

Clear clustering of xianxia and cultivation themes. Around 12 games in the list carry keywords such as “xian,” “cultivation,” or “xianxia.” That density is not overwhelming within a list of nearly two hundred titles, but read alongside the scale of the publishers approved, the signal looks different — Perfect World’s Zhu Xian: Return and Seasun and Huya’s Jianxia Qingyuan: Reunion are both official sequels to long-running xianxia and wuxia IPs, with top-tier publishers collectively pressing confirm on the traditional xianxia track.

Derivative works based on well-known IPs approved in batches; IP licensing and adaptation remains a core publisher strategy. The list includes a string of familiar names:

Management sims approved in concentration. Landlord Simulator, Milk Tea Mouse Grand Restaurant, I Run a Restaurant in Chang’an, Chang’an Little Kitchen, Tangtang Dessert House, Wonderful Cuisine House, Box Bakery and other products were approved in this batch, covering sub-directions such as food service, construction, and management. Management sims are a classic track for small and mid-sized teams, and a pile-up of this density in a single batch shows that project greenlighting in this category is running hot.

Read the three phenomena together and you hit the sharpest structural observation in this batch: no entirely new original flagship project appears in the domestic list (NetEase Games Daily and 18183 agree on this). In plain language: this batch produced no heavyweight original project at the level of “a new world, new gameplay, and a new brand built from scratch,” and the licenses issued in volume flowed mainly into derivative development of existing IPs and reproduction of mature categories. The “hard to get a license” problem that license normalization is solving is indeed improving, but the most imaginative part of the supply structure — original flagships — was absent this month. Of course, a single month’s list cannot support a trend judgment on supply quality, so this stays on the monthly series as a continuous observation item.

One footnote from a regional angle: per Guangdong Game Industry Association statistics, 59 domestic licenses involved Guangdong companies as publisher or operator, accounting for 32.2% of the national total; among imported licenses, one involved a Guangdong company, and Guangdong accounted for 5 of the change records. More than a third of the country’s domestic licenses are connected to Guangdong, which tells you something about industrial concentration. This is a single-source statistic and serves only as background reference.

4. Key Product Lines at a Glance: Top Publishers’ Approved Lists and the Import Lineup#

As usual, the key product lines are organized into tables. To be clear: the lists below are preliminary media tallies and non-exhaustive (Nanfang+ and 18183 scope); different sources list slightly different product sets, and this article keeps its citation restrained and does not claim a complete list.

Key domestic products:

Two observations: first, top-tier publishers such as Tencent, NetEase, Perfect World and 37Games all landed approvals in this batch, and the stability of approvals for top publishers continues the cadence seen all year; second, the density of dual-platform filings in the list is quite high, a phenomenon this article takes up separately in section 6.

Key imported products:

In the import list, Zilong Interactive’s Odin: Divine Betrayal was approved in “mobile and client” dual-platform form, echoing the dual-platform trend in the domestic list; the sports title NBA: Split Second is a rare genre sample in an import list.

Finally, of the 10 change records, three have clear reporting: for the long-running casual online game Audition, both the publishing unit and the operating unit changed to Shanghai Jiuyou Network Technology Co., Ltd.; for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, the operating unit changed from Shanghai Moonton Technology Co., Ltd. to Shanghai Yilin Technology Co., Ltd.; and the registered version of the Switch game The Legend of Feierna changed. Operating-entity turnover and version registration adjustments are routine within the license system, but when a product like Audition, which has been operating for many years, sees both its publishing and operating units change, that usually corresponds to an overall handover at the publishing-strategy level and deserves a second look.

5. Separate Observation: miHoYo’s Dual-Platform License for Primordial Knot and the Business-Model Signals#

Beyond this batch’s list, one product-line item deserves its own section: per an industry media tally on October 29, miHoYo’s new realistic co-op hunting title Primordial Knot has obtained a “mobile + client” dual-platform license.

Let me set out the information status first. This product is not unfamiliar on this site — in last month’s September license observation, we built a complete quick-reference table for its information boundaries: the official “Ten Questions, Ten Answers” confirmed that characters are not obtained through gacha and that PC is supported at launch, but the “dual-platform form” then rested on a single briefing source, with the authoritative list not spelling it out item by item, and we flagged caution explicitly. This time, the industry media tally states a “mobile + client” dual-platform license, consistent in direction with last month’s briefing scope; but under this piece’s information discipline, that product entry still has not been verified item by item against the authority’s original list, so this article cites it as “industry media tally” and keeps the flag in place.

There is also an update on the model side. The industry media’s account is that the official line confirms characters are not gacha and can be obtained for free, with monetization resting on cosmetics and similar. Against last month’s status table, “characters are not gacha” was already the official position from the “Ten Questions, Ten Answers,” while “characters obtainable for free” is a natural extension of that stance, and “monetization via cosmetics and similar” pushes the previously vague area — where the “complete commercialization plan is still under careful planning” — one step further forward. On the product-setting side, industry reporting matches previous official disclosures: the setting is a fantasy continent where theocracy is declining and order is collapsing, and players take the role of a “Weaver” forming teams to hunt mythical beasts.

Read against the structural background of this batch, this combination of “dual-platform license + no-gacha business model” carries three layers of signal (the following is analytical inference):

• In filing form, it lands right on the industry’s beat. A top-tier publisher filing its heavyweight new title as “mobile + client” is in sync with the dual-platform moves of a batch of mid-tier publishers in this batch. When the largest publisher by scale chooses dual-platform for its most important product, the judgment that “mobile + client is the default” turns from an industry observation into an industry consensus.
• In business model, it is another doubling down on “dual-platform + free + cosmetics monetization.” No character gacha means the payment point does not sit on character acquisition, while a dual-platform filing means the same product has to serve players with two sets of operating habits, mobile and PC. How the combination of payment model and platform form plays out depends on the complete plan the official side discloses later.
• In observation method, it demonstrates the continuity this monthly license series should have. Last month’s disputed dual-platform scope received corroboration from industry media this month — information in a single month’s list may not be settled that month, and only by stringing each month’s observations together does the information-status table fill in cell by cell.

To restate: all three layers above are analysis, and the final word on the commercialization plan rests with the official announcement. The speed from first reveal to license, the dual-platform filing form, and the unconventional payment design — these three things together still make Primordial Knot the highest-information-density sample among current domestic new titles.

6. Cross-Platform Filing Becomes Standard Practice: From Big-Publisher Experiment to Industry Default#

Pulling the view from a single product back to the batch as a whole, dual-platform filing is a structural change more worth recording than any individual product.

NetEase Games Daily’s observation: in this batch, Jianxia Qingyuan: Reunion, Tomorrow’s Defense Line, The Echo He Gave, Forgotten Eve: Silver Key, Girls’ Frontline: Blue Butterfly Contract and other products were all filed as “mobile + client,” and PC-side interoperability has moved from an experimental move by big publishers to standard industry practice.

The composition of this list is worth a closer look:

• Seasun and Huya’s Jianxia Qingyuan: Reunion — a long-running wuxia IP, dual-platform filing;
• 4399’s Tomorrow’s Defense Line — a shooter title, dual-platform filing;
• Happy Elements’ The Echo He Gave — dual-platform filing;
• Lingxi Interactive Entertainment’s Forgotten Eve: Silver Key — dual-platform filing;
• Sunborn Network’s Girls’ Frontline: Blue Butterfly Contract — an anime-style tactical title, dual-platform filing.

Five products from publishers of very different scale and category: there are veteran teams deep in wuxia, publishers known for casual and platform businesses, and top-tier developers on the anime-style track. When dual-platform filing appears across such a dispersed publisher spectrum, it stops being a series of independent decisions by individual companies and becomes an industry default — the PC side has gone from an optional question of “should we do it” to a required box to tick at filing time.

The import list testifies to the same trend: 3 of the 12 imported products were filed as “mobile and client,” a not-insignificant share. Dual-platform filing density appearing on both the domestic and import lines at once shows this is not a special preference of one type of publisher but a routine path already formed at the filing level.

One extended judgment on this trend (analytical inference): once cross-platform filing becomes standard practice, the center of competition shifts from “is there a PC version” to “how good is the PC version.” The “mobile and client” line on the filing form is only an entry-level promise; consistency of the dual-platform experience, completeness of data interoperability, and the depth of PC-side control adaptation are where the gaps open up next. For player communities this is close to a can’t-lose change — at least at the filing level, platform lock-in such as “mobile exclusive” is losing its approval-side footing.

In Closing#

Having taken this batch apart, what strikes me most is not any single number but two “Quiet changes”: imported licenses quietly set a new monthly high for the year, and dual-platform filing quietly became standard practice. Two installments into this license observation, I increasingly feel that the value of this monthly sample lies not in any single month’s flashpoint but in the continuity of scope — whether the plateau of about 169 titles a month holds up, when the discrepancy in dual-platform scope gets an authoritative explanation, which month original flagships come back — all of it can only be seen by keeping accounts month by month.

The fact that 12 imported titles set a yearly high is worth sitting with for a few more days. Import licenses have long been a “small quantities, frequent batches” trickle, and a sudden step up in monthly clearance is a variable both for the pace at which imported products are brought in and for the competitive density of domestic categories. When next month’s list comes out, flip to the import rows first.

As for miHoYo’s “characters are not gacha” answer, the official line says the commercialization plan is still under careful planning, so let the bullet fly a while longer. A data-minded person’s patience happens to be exactly what is needed here.

— Chasun, NTGame Editor