China's Box Office Data Authority Now Tracks FMV Games as Its Own Category

In China, the app that settles arguments about how a film is performing is Maoyan Pro (猫眼专业版), the professional tier of the country’s largest movie ticketing platform. Distributors open it to watch box office update by the second, to check screening counts, to see which titles a chain should hold another week. Its database has long been organised into sections: films, series, short dramas, web films, variety shows, people.

It now has one more, sitting in that same row: 影游, film-games.

The category Maoyan calls 影游 covers live-action interactive films sold as games.

That sounds like a small piece of product design. It is not. It is the clearest institutional signal the genre has had. Maoyan’s database is where Chinese film professionals go to find out whether something is real, and the company built the category, populated it with sales estimates, rankings and audience metrics, and placed it beside the formats the industry already takes seriously. Being counted is how a format stops being a curiosity.

What the numbers say

Maoyan lists cumulative revenue, an estimated unit count, a sales rank inside the film-game category, launch and current pricing, peak concurrent players, average playtime, and a set of social reach figures drawn from Bilibili, Douyin and Weibo.

The top of the revenue list, in the entries we were able to read, looks like this.

Revenge on Gold Diggers is the outlier. Maoyan puts it at 66.7 million RMB, roughly 10 million dollars, from an estimated 2.02 million units, and ranks it second by units sold in the whole category. For a live-action production priced at 33 RMB, that is a film-sized audience bought one copy at a time.

Breakout 13, ALT Lab’s 2023 drama, is listed at 20.2 million RMB from an estimated 631,000 units, sixth by units. Its own page shows a detail worth pausing on: Steam approval of 92 percent against 80 percent in the opening week, which is the shape of a title that grew on word of mouth rather than on a launch spike.

Two Western titles hold their own in that list. Her Story is tenth on revenue, the highest-placed non-Chinese entry, and Wales Interactive’s The Complex is fifteenth. Sam Barlow’s 2015 detective piece is still, a decade later, the Western reference point inside a Chinese industry database.

The metrics nobody else publishes

The reason this category matters editorially is that Maoyan measures things Steam does not.

For Revenge on Gold Diggers it logs 416 million total impressions across Chinese social platforms, including 354 million views on the Douyin hashtag, 41 million on Bilibili and 21 million reads on Weibo, against 66,000 written player reviews. For Breakout 13: 214 million impressions, 122 million on Douyin, 70 million on Bilibili.

Those are television numbers. They describe a kind of audience the Western conversation about FMV, which still tends to treat the form as a cult interest for people who remember Night Trap, has no vocabulary for.

The pages also log average playtime, 9 hours for Revenge on Gold Diggers and 8.8 for Breakout 13, and peak concurrent players, 89,000 and 12,000. Nine hours is a long evening. It is also three times a feature film, which is the more useful comparison for anyone trying to work out what these productions actually are.

Why the category appeared now

Maoyan did not build a section for a hobby. The money moved first.

On June 1, 2026, Bingo Group, the listed company chaired by Stephen Chow, took a strategic stake in Interactive Star (互动之星), with the two sides committing to work together on AI series, interactive film-games, live-action production and IP. Tencent’s TiMi studios backed Road to Empress. ByteDance is incubating an interactive title of its own. Tencent has a separate platform effort, DreamNow, aimed at interactive creation.

The pull is financial and it is specific. In Chinese film and television, a production company typically keeps 20 to 30 percent of platform revenue. On an interactive film-game sold directly to players, it keeps around 70 percent, and it gets paid faster. For studios holding IP that is about to expire and budgets that no longer stretch to a full drama series, a production in the low millions of RMB is a way to keep the rights alive and the cast working.

AI changed the arithmetic again this year. Industry participants quoted by Chinese outlet EntGroup put the effect plainly: a live-action project that would have cost over 10 million RMB can land at 6 to 7 million with AI in the pipeline, and a full production cycle can compress from eight months to four. The immediate consequence is not cheaper romance dramas. It is genres that were previously unaffordable, period settings, science fiction, anything needing sets that had to be built.

The gap that is still open

One line from that same reporting should be read carefully by anyone outside China. A producer describing what happens after a hit: almost every time, players ask where they can watch it, the answer is Steam, and the reply is “what is Steam?”

That is the whole problem in one exchange. This is the most commercially successful moment interactive film has ever had, and it is happening on a distribution channel that the mainstream audience for the content does not use. Chinese long-video and short-video platforms have all shipped interactive features at some point, and none has committed to a steady supply of new work.

The most interesting experiment we have seen described is the opposite of a platform play: teams testing interactive films in actual cinemas, one ticket per seat, the whole room voting, the story moving in real time. The arithmetic circulating for that model is a 200-seat screen running five sessions a day at 35,000 RMB in daily takings. Whether that survives contact with a real booking schedule is another question. That it is being modelled at all tells you where the ambition has moved.

What it means from here

For the last two years, the honest Western summary of this genre has been that a few beloved Western titles exist and something large is happening in China that nobody has properly counted. The counting has now started, and it is being done by the same organisation that counts the box office.

Two things follow. The first is that the scale argument is over: a category whose leading title sold two million copies is not niche, whatever the shelf it sits on. The second is that the localisation gap is now the commercial story. Revenge on Gold Diggers reached 51,000 Steam reviews with an English release. Bonds of Shadows, out this week, launched in Simplified Chinese only. The audience that Maoyan is measuring in hundreds of millions of impressions is still, for now, almost entirely domestic.

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Method and limits: figures are as displayed in the Maoyan Pro app on September 23, 2026, converted at 6.70 RMB to the dollar. Maoyan describes its unit counts as estimates, and two adjacent titles in the ranking show an identical revenue figure, which suggests banded estimation rather than reported sales. The revenue ranking and the unit-sales ranking are separate lists and a title can sit in different positions on each. Studio-reported sales figures for these titles, which cover channels beyond Steam, are higher than Maoyan’s estimates. Industry context on investment, margins and AI production costs is drawn from reporting published by EntGroup on June 7, 2026. Every title named here that we track has a page in the FMV Directory.