Walking the halls of Gamescom, the biggest, most elaborate booths you’ll see will generally have an equally big, familiar name attached. Here’s Capcom, Xbox, Sega, EA, Ubisoft, and so on. But at this year’s event, a significant chunk of Halls 6 and 7 will be taken up by a name you probably won’t be so familiar with: 4Divinity.
“It’s enormous by any standard,” says Philip Doust, director of 4Divinity’s UK entity, of the publisher’s Gamescom presence. 4Divinity is bringing six titles to the behind-closed-doors B2B area, five of them to the associated trailer showcases, and four to the B2C showfloor on two separate stands, the biggest of which spans 800 square metres. The publisher is going all out, not only in footprint, but also in spectacle. “We’re using one of the best booth builders in Gamescom,” Doust says. “There’s been no expense spared on that front.”
The area for ’80s pop-culture RPG Showa American Story, for example, features a rebuilt version of the Hollywood Hills – which have been rebranded the Neo Yokohama Hills in the game’s alternative timeline, where the United States is ruled by Japan. “We have a Golden Gate Bridge that stands seven metres high, with the Japanese lanterns on it,” Doust adds. “We have a diner we’ve recreated that you walk into to play the game. It’s all very experiential.”
So, when Doust says no expense spared…
“I can’t talk [exact] figures, that would be crass,” he replies, “but it’s millions of dollars of investment. Just from that footprint we have, it should be clear we’re investing to that kind of level. I think it’s reflective of how seriously we’re taking the western market. Which not every Chinese company necessarily does, or knows how to.”
Disc jockeys
That’s a hint to why you might not have heard of a company that can afford to spend this much on its Gamescom presence. 4Divinity is just one of several gaming companies under the umbrella of Singapore-based group GCL Global Holdings (there’s also an imitation-diamond jewellery maker in the mix). GCL “was primarily built on a physical distribution business, through a company called Epicsoft, that has been going for nearly 20 years now,” Doust explains. Obviously, that’s a tricky business right now, given Sony’s recent announcements.
“It’s still a significant part of our business as a group, and we’ll continue to do it as long as Sony allows, as long as there are discs to produce,” Doust says. “But we recognise that it’s a declining business, and if that’s where the mainstay of the business was, clearly we needed something that was more on the digital side.”
Hence 4Divinity, which was originally launched in 2022 as a co-publisher for western companies wanting to bring their games to Southeast Asia. “Finding a [western] game that excels in Asia – China specifically – is very tough,” Doust says. “We pulled it off with Atomic Heart – China was a huge market for Atomic Heart – and then we replicated that with Stalker 2. But we recognised that these games were kind of outliers.”
“We’re now up to eight games in the portfolio, all coming out within the next two years”
In other words, neither business was likely to bring the kind of growth required by GCL, as a Nasdaq-listed company. “From a growth perspective, it really had to be global publishing at that point,” Doust says. And so 4Divinity began signing Chinese-made games to publish around the world. It was a process that began before Doust joined the company in late 2024 – “they’d already signed two or three games; a couple of smaller indies, but also Showa American Story, which is a big play for us” – but things have only scaled up from there. “We’re now up to eight games in the portfolio, all coming out within the next two years,” Doust says. “So it’s been a huge growth period.”
This initial line-up has a few strands of connective tissue: “All our games are predominantly single player. They’re 15–20 hour experiences. They’re mid-tier priced.”
This wasn’t necessarily the plan in advance, he says, but it’s formed into a solid strategy: to target the oft-discussed squeezed middle of games (a strategy that’s also being pursued by US firm ProbablyMonsters).
“This, for me, is exactly the crux of what people want from games right now,” Doust says. “They don’t have 200 hours to put into a live service. The $80 game, that’s probably reserved for one or two [titles]. But I think people are willing to invest $40–50 into a single-player experience.”
Even if most businesses aren’t. Doust understands why: “These are games that cost between $5 million and $20 million to make, roughly. Whether you’re in China or the West, that’s a big investment.” With all the other associated operating costs, “you need that game to sell a million units just to break even. That’s not very attractive, because a million units these days is tough. Discoverability is an issue. We all know this.”
Fresh faces
Targeting the AA sector is not the only thing 4Divinity is doing differently. “Everything you’re going to see at Gamescom is new IP. Even in China, it’s all new to games, at least. But in the west – absolutely new IP,” Doust says. “Bigger companies are not taking bets on one new IP, let alone six.” Given the rising costs of game development, “AAA has become so risk averse that it’s become a franchise business. Unless you [already] have a franchise, you’re not in that game, generally. Apart from some emerging Chinese companies.”
It’s not hard to guess what games he might be alluding to there. When it comes to 4Divinity’s big global pivot, Doust says, “I think the real catalyst was Black Myth: Wukong.” GCL handled that game’s physical PS5 distribution globally, and acted as publisher in Taiwan. “[Game Science] being a Chinese company, it’s not so easy for them to do that, so we were able to broker that from our position in Singapore.”
Wukong’s success seemed to represent a wider opportunity for GCL. “Since the console ban was lifted in 2016, a lot of Chinese developers who’ve been working in the west – and there are a great deal of them – went home. They formed these console/PC studios,” Doust explains. “Black Myth: Wukong was one of the first out of the gate, but there are increasingly more and more of them.” With two offices in China, “that gives us access to this market that’s turning out some really interesting games.”
And games made, it must be noted, for considerably less than their western counterparts. A Chinese tax filing suggests that Wukong cost somewhere north of 300 million Yuan (around $44.6 million) to make; in June this year, it was reported that the game had sold 30 million copies. That’s quite the profit.
“Development costs are so much more inexpensive in China,” Doust acknowledges. “And [Chinese players] are incredibly price-sensitive.” That necessarily defined 4Divinity’s strategy within the region – and, presumably, makes it easier to test in other markets Doust’s theory that, while most major publishers have withdrawn from making these types of games for financial reasons, player interest in them hasn’t simply dried up as a result. “So there’s a massive drought of supply.”
“Development costs are so much more inexpensive in China”
Doust’s mission is to connect up western demand for “new experiences that don’t cost the earth, that you can [enjoy] and then move on from” with the supply that Chinese developers are perhaps better placed to deliver.
“My whole thesis, when I started working with Jacky [Choo, GCL chairman], was ‘what if we can find common themes between east and west?’ And that’s not as challenging as it might sound. Loyalty, trust, defiance, revenge – you find those kernels of connection, and you market the game at the same time, with the same asset, but just with a different lens or a different message that resonates [with the targeted market]. It’s something that no one, in my opinion, has really done effectively.”
Cross-border content
Games will still find their way across the borders, even if you don’t make this effort. Doust calls this “our ‘do-nothing’ business. That is, we only market the games in China, there’s a little bit of a ripple effect in the west, and you generally end up with an 80/20 split. Precisely what happened with Wukong. It sold 20 million units in China, and three or four million units outside of China. That’s about 80/20.” That works in both directions, he notes: “Any western company, their do-nothing business is 80/20. I’d argue that 20 is probably Asia more broadly – but half of that is going to be China.”
The hope for 4Divinity, with its cross-border marketing push, “is that we get to a 60/40 scenario,” Doust says. “Not anything more ambitious than that. But that’s meaningful, when it comes to the number of units you can sell. I look at Wukong and think, goodness, if that maybe had done something along these lines, we could be talking about the biggest-selling game of all time. Which would be very interesting, right? Considering the scale of it [in terms of development costs] versus the actual bestselling game of all time.”
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The publisher is attempting to do this in both directions, Doust adds: “east to west, west to east, kind of like a Silk Road thing.” Currently, 4Divinity has a single game in its portfolio developed outside of China: Guns Of Eschaton, made by Eschatology Entertainment, a new studio founded in Cyprus by an alum of World Of Tanks developer Wargaming. But the marketing push begin in China, he explains.
“The very first thing we did, after announcing the game, was to take it to Bilibili World” – Asia’s gigantic anime and pop-culture convention, held in Shanghai. “No western company is doing that, certainly not that early in the campaign. That started enough of a groundswell that China is now the number-two wishlist country for the game, behind the US. That’s healthy for us. That shows we’ve got the chops to make this work, in either direction.”
“Having not done much in the west yet, it’s a chance to make a bit of noise”
4Divinity’s huge Gamescom presence, then, is the mirror image of that strategy. Its games are coming to Cologne hot on the heels of a showing at ChinaJoy in Shanghai, just weeks earlier, Doust points out. “Rather than getting to a point where the games have already got massive traction in China and then trying to play catch-up, we’re getting out there [in both markets] at the same time.”
But as much as promoting the games themselves, Gamescom is the western coming-out party for 4Divinity. “We could do game-by-game campaigns – and to some extent, we are. But Gamescom allows us to consolidate all of that into one big hit. Having not done much in the west yet, it’s a chance to make a bit of noise.” Hence the sheer scale of the thing, it seems. “If this is a 4Divinity portfolio play, where we want to introduce the games, and ourselves, to the west,” Doust says, “why not go big?”