With 110 million players, Xiaohongshu actively lays out the game track, from exhibiting at game exhibitions to launching independent game channels. This article analyzes the development status of Xiaohongshu’s game ecosystem, content changes, and the opportunities and challenges faced by creators, and discusses its potential and path to become a “game guide”.
The summer season is approaching, and there are new actions on the Xiaohongshu game track.
As a hot node in the game industry, the summer season is the peak period for the activity and return of gamers, and it is also a period of love between game manufacturers and publicity platforms.
Recently, Tencent’s “Honor of Kings” and miHoYo’s “Honkai: Star Rail” two games ushered in version updates, and related topics were on the Xiaohongshu hot list, with a single topic reaching 6.54 million, including both promotional materials for the game’s official account and players’ spontaneous creation of cos images.
In fact, long before this year’s summer season, Xiaohongshu had already laid out the game track.
In July 2024, Xiaohongshu participated in China Joy, the most influential game exhibition in China, for the first time, shouting the slogan of “New World of Games, Breaking the Circle and New Ecology”;
Since February this year, Xiaohongshu has successively announced cooperation with the Honor of Kings Professional League and the Intrepid Contract Champion Tour CN League, becoming its official broadcasting platform and interactive discussion community;
Recently, Xiaohongshu launched the “Game TA Visit Project”, which attracts users to take photos and interact in the form of offline city check-ins, and has been officially announced in Shanghai and Shenzhen. Last summer, Xiaohongshu also launched a similar check-in activity “Game City Crossing Plan”.
While Xiaohongshu is making frequent moves on the game track, the momentum of game accounts has been silent.
According to Xinhong, a Xiaohongshu data tool under the new list, in the first half of this year, only one account of “NetEase Game” was shortlisted among the top 20 accounts of Xiaohongshu, while at least 5 game accounts were on the list in the first half of last year.
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Behind this, what changes have occurred in the game ecology of Xiaohongshu? What does it mean for game creators? Recently, we chatted with a number of game industry practitioners to try to find the answer.
01 To make a “game guide”, is Xiaohongshu qualified?
This time, what Xiaohongshu wants to do is not only a “life guide”, but also a “game guide”.
According to Xiaohongshu’s official data released in 2024, the monthly active users of the Xiaohongshu platform have reached 330 million, of which more than 110 million are gamers, accounting for more than one-third, the growth rate of game notes has increased by 88% year-on-year, and the growth rate of game note exposure has increased by more than 149% year-on-year.
This means that Xiaohongshu already has the soil to develop game content. At present, Xiaohongshu has launched an independent “game” channel, which can be personalized on the user’s homepage, roughly including strategy sharing, gameplay discussion, plot review and other types.
As players’ aesthetic tastes in games tend to diversify, hard indicators such as strong strength and smooth operation are no longer the only reference for identifying game taste, and the expression of light-hearted, funny, and humorous jokes can also attract game enthusiasts.
Game data tracking platform DataEye monitored that in May this year, Xiaohongshu’s Top 3 popular game categories were role-playing games, female-oriented games and strategy games, accounting for 53%, 27% and 8% respectively. Compared with large-scale 3A games such as “Black Myth: Wukong” that test console equipment, the operation experience of the above games is more lightweight, and the startup cost and time consumption of a single game are more flexible and controllable.
According to Xinhong data, a total of 6 official game accounts are currently listed in the top 20 accounts in the Xiaohongshu game category, of which “NetEase Egg Boy Party”, “Honor of Kings” and “Genshin Impact” rank in the top three, with more than 3 million fans.
The growth of the number of fans of the official account reflects the investment of game manufacturers in Xiaohongshu to a certain extent.
Taking “Egg Boy Party” as an example, in the past year, it has not only launched traffic cash incentives and support unique to Xiaohongshu many times, but also set up platform-exclusive cooperation events for Xiaohongshu. According to the new red data, the topic of the same name #Egg Boy Party has reached 60.5 billion views on Xiaohongshu, ranking first in the game topic list.
Among the top 20 game accounts on Xiaohongshu, there is also no shortage of “egg boy” bloggers, such as “egg boy rice is very thin” and “egg boy party cheese”. Due to the high degree of freedom and high sociality of the game, the “Egg Boy” bloggers also have more room to play, such as popularizing various gameplay and skills, as well as linking with other bloggers to form a rich social network and improve fan stickiness.
As a content community dominated by female users, Xiaohongshu has gathered a solid group of “Yiyou” players.
Yiyou, the full name of Otome Game, refers to female-oriented love games, and “Love and Deep Space” in Xiaohongshu’s TOP20 game accounts is one of them, which also topped the iOS best-selling list for the first time at the end of September last year. At present, “Love and Deep Space” has accumulated 2.09 million fans on Xiaohongshu, and recently launched a creative incentive program, where users can participate in activities by posting notes with related topics.
In addition, a number of otome games such as “Like a Kite”, “Undecided Event Book”, and “Love of Light and Night” have also bet on the operation of Xiaohongshu and launched similar creative incentive programs in the summer.
It is worth mentioning that the gameplay of Yiyou not only appears in the game, but also derives from real life, such as selling the surrounding millet economy, cos-commissioning that simulates the real dating experience, etc., and feeds back online with offline topic discussions.
“The core players of Yiyou are young and powerful women, which overlaps with the core audience of Xiaohongshu, coupled with Xiaohongshu’s decentralized push mechanism, which can accurately match similar players with similar preferences,” A Berry, a senior practitioner in the game industry, told the editorial department of the new list. According to her understanding, Xiaohongshu began to recruit special game sector operations last year, which shows the platform’s investment.
02 Xiaohongshu game bloggers can’t gain fans?
Even though Xiaohongshu has anchored the game track, there has been no recognizable head game blogger so far.
Behind this, on the one hand, it is related to the continuous changes in the Xiaohongshu game content ecology.
Among the top 20 accounts in the Xiaohongshu game category, the content updates of the 4 accounts of “Lin Xi”, “Lin Yan”, “Su Yiche” and “Flirting Brigade (Nan Feng)” were stagnant a year or two ago, but the number of fans remained above 1.5 million, and the number of fans of “Lin Xi” even reached 2.9 million, second only to the three official game accounts of “NetEase Egg Boy Party”, “Honor of Kings” and “Genshin Impact”.
From the perspective of content type, these four accounts focus on couple game accounts, creating content in the form of “game slicing + post-dubbing”, and they all say that they can get more information on the game companion app “Bixin” to drain traffic.
Although the above four accounts did not give a public explanation for the suspension of updates, some netizens pointed out in the comment area that most of these couple accounts were posed and questioned their authenticity. At the same time, some netizens believe that the suspension of such accounts may be related to the decline in discussion volume of Bixin App in recent years, and the phenomenon of “finding a partner” in Xiaohongshu is prevalent, and players are more inclined to the more cost-effective free mutual aid model.
On the other hand, whether game bloggers gain fans out of the circle is positively correlated with the popularity of the game.
In 2024, “Egg Boy Party” will become a hotly discussed hit in the gaming circle, not only the official game account will make a name for itself on Xiaohongshu, but also drive the increase of fans of related game bloggers. According to the new red data, in 2024, at least 7 “Egg Boy” game bloggers will achieve an annual increase of more than one million fans. In the first half of this year, the popularity of “Egg Boy Party” tended to stabilize, and there were also no eye-catching bloggers among the top fans.
In this regard, Ah Berry believes that the number of bullish fans alone cannot fully explain the problem, “Whether or not a game account is related to the popularity of the game itself, such as the launch of new games or major version updates, but looking at the first half of 2025, there are indeed no big hits in the entire game industry.”
Rather than saying that Xiaohongshu is digging new game hits, game manufacturers are also betting on a popular blind box on Xiaohongshu, which is in line with Xiaohongshu’s positioning as a game publicity platform.
The editorial department of the new list compared the commercial launch list of the Xiaohongshu game category in May and June this year, and found that a new game called “Noisy Cute Kitchen” ranked in the top 2 of the launch list for two consecutive months, and according to the new red data, the cumulative delivery cost in two months reached 265,600, surpassing the large Xiaohongshu investors such as “Love and Deep Space” and “Genshin Impact”.
“Noisy Cute Kitchen” was officially launched on May 28, and once topped the iOS free list, and the number of fans of Xiaohongshu’s official account has reached 126,000, which is higher than the number of fans of Douyin, Bilibili, and Kuaishou, and its promotion position is also the most obvious in Xiaohongshu.
“Noisy Cute Kitchen” is the top promotion position of Xiaohongshu
Whether it is the changes in the game content ecology of Xiaohongshu games or the launch experiments of game manufacturers, they provide game creators with creative space to play.
Compared with the early “game + couple” model, today’s Xiaohongshu users prefer the freedom in the game, such as games with exquisite painting styles, which can become a source of inspiration for life makeup and fashion outfits; If you can’t get friends in two-player games, you can also find partners in Xiaohongshu to help each other……
Taking the Xiaohongshu game blogger “Xu Xiaobo”, who has gained 390,000 followers in the past 30 days, as an example, the account is mainly based on the matching of the sharing game “Shining Warmth”, and is good at rejuvenating the “ugly items” submitted by netizens, and changing it into an atmospheric weapon, with the highest number of likes in a single video reaching 439,000.
Higher freedom in the game means that it can open up players’ independent creativity to a greater extent, and inconspicuous game materials can also become a key footnote in popular videos.
It is worth noting that the game between content ecology and commercialization also needs to find a balance. During this year’s Valentine’s Day, NetEase’s game “Sixteen Voices of Yanyun” caused controversy due to the use of underage female characters to promote Valentine’s Day activities, and its “lightning protection” notes fermented much faster than other communities on Xiaohongshu.
On the whole, the Xiaohongshu game ecosystem has been torn apart under the traditional marketing model, providing a new field for discussion for gamers who tend to be lightweight and personalized. However, the same content platforms, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili and even Weibo, are all ready to move the marketing budget of game manufacturers, and Xiaohongshu is not a simple path.
At the same time, Xiaohongshu is also constantly broadening the boundaries of games, increasing e-sports content such as Honor of Kings and Valorant Contract, so as to tap game groups without clear gender orientation. In the face of such a road, Xiaohongshu’s 110 million gamers may only be a starting point.
