Understanding Game Monetization in China from a Gameworker Perspective

This study examines how Chinese game workers understand and enact monetization within the commercial, creative, and institutional logics of contemporary game production. Positioning itself against prior research that has largely centered on Western contexts, the work argues that China's mobile-first industry, where aggressive monetization such as loot boxes is especially prevalent, offers a distinct setting for understanding how monetization practices are shaped by industrial norms, market pressure, and regulation. The authors frame their participants as "gameworkers" to emphasize that monetization is shaped not only by design choices but also by broader dynamics of game labor.

The empirical basis is a set of interviews with 24 Chinese gameworkers, 21 of whom had worked on freemium games, spanning publishers, designers, developers, investors, and studio owners. The transcripts were coded using grounded theory to develop an inductive account of monetization in Chinese production. The analysis identified three interrelated themes: the business of games, the design of games, and the dilemmas inherent in monetizing them. Participants approached monetization mainly through game category, an industrial classification based on market, platform, and business considerations, rather than through genre.

A central finding is that gambling-like designs such as loot boxes were often legitimized by workers who saw them as necessary for commercial survival in highly competitive markets. This anxiety was intensified by China's licensing system, which requires government approval before publication and inadvertently pushes companies to recoup rising development and marketing costs through monetization mechanisms. The authors conclude that workers were compelled to adopt a "commercialized production ethos," a mode of production prioritizing profit as a structural condition rather than a matter of individual preference, which complicates creative and ethical design practices. They recommend greater transparency in regulations affecting production and closer collaboration among industry, academia, and government.