A few years ago, phrases such as "Indian video game" or "Latvian game" did not inspire much confidence. Fairly or not, the association was often of mobile clutter. Think low-budget titles cranking out ads or regional knockoffs of whatever happened to be popular in the West.
The largely unspoken assumption was that serious creative work took place in a handful of countries, including Japan, the United States, and Canada, while everyone else was either catching up or not really trying. However, over the past few years, developers from countries that barely registered on the global gaming map have produced work that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
From visual novels, to handcrafted action RPGs drawing on mythologies that rarely get big-budget treatment, to titles that have landed GOTY nominations and sold in the tens of millions worldwide (numbers that would have seemed absurd to predict even ten years ago.)
What's driving this is harder to pin down to a single trend. Whether it's better tooling, more accessible distribution, growing local industries, and players actively seeking out something different... clearly all of it has compounded. The momentum shows no sign of slowing.
China: From Mobile Factories to Global Bestsellers
For much of its modern history, China's gaming industry relied on a few familiar formulas: free-to-play mobile games, online titles built around microtransactions, and products designed primarily for domestic audiences, often without translations for international players. The idea that a Chinese studio might challenge the likes of FromSoftware or Santa Monica Studio on their own terms once would have normally sounded like a stretch.
However, by 2016, Game Science founder Feng Ji had noticed that nearly a third of active Steam users were Chinese and that many of those players were growing tired of the mobile-first, microtransaction-heavy games that had come to define the domestic industry.
Game Science aimed about as high as a studio possibly could. Founded two years earlier by Feng Ji and several colleagues who had left Tencent, the company built two mobile games first, and used that revenue to self-fund something far more ambitious.
That project was Black Myth: Wukong, a dark-fantasy action RPG based on Journey to the West, one of China's four great classical novels. Built with Unreal Engine 5 as a full-scale AAA production, the game launched in August 2024, reached more than 2.2 million concurrent Steam players on its first day, sold 20 million copies within its first month, and has since surpassed 25 million units worldwide.
By Steam metrics, it was the biggest release of 2024 in both units sold and gross revenue, outperforming Palworld, Helldivers 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
The studios that followed a similar path did so across very different genres.
Pathea Games turned My Time at Portia and its follow-up, My Time at Sandrock, into a globally popular life-simulation franchise. Through steady iteration and consistency, the studio found an international audience for its wholesome crafting RPGs.
The two games have sold more than 3 million copies combined, while a third entry, My Time at Evershine, raised $2.8 million on Kickstarter and reached its initial funding goal just 35 minutes after the campaign launched.
Meanwhile, Pixpil's Eastward blended 16-bit RPG sensibilities with a story-driven post-apocalyptic setting. Its appearance on numerous year-end lists helped demonstrate that Chinese indie development had range extending far beyond any single genre or budget tier.
India: From Outsourcing Hub to Finally Making Games on Its Own Terms
India's historical role in the games industry was largely behind the scenes. The country had, and still has, deep reserves of technical talent, along with plenty of studios handling contract work and outsourcing for larger Western developers. However, original games with Indian creative leads, were a much rarer thing.
The consumer base was clearly there. India's gaming industry was valued at $3.7 billion in 2024 and $5 billion in 2025, with projections pointing well beyond that before the end of the decade. With an audience already there, the question was whether original development talent and infrastructure would catch up, and whether the games coming out of India could find traction beyond the domestic market. Both now appear to be happening.
One of the clearest signs of this shift came from Nodding Heads Games, a small studio based in Pune. Its debut title, Raji: An Ancient Epic, became the first Indian game nominated at The Game Awards, earning a Best Debut Game nomination in 2020. Drawing from Hindu mythology and the visual language of Pahari painting, the game surpassed 2 million players and even received an Unreal Dev Grant from Epic Games.
For a 13-person team that had previously struggled to find a publisher, these were remarkable results. Raji ultimately lost to Phasmophobia, but the nomination mattered more than the trophy. It helped place Indian game development on a much broader global stage.
Indian-led game development remains a nascent scene, but the work emerging from it reflects enormous ambition.
Son of Thanjai, from Ayelet Studio, is a cinematic action-adventure set in the 11th-century Chola Empire, with combat built around the Surul Vaal, a whip-like sword rooted in Dravidian tradition. It has not been released yet, but its reveal attracted immediate international attention, largely because its setting and visual direction feel unlike anything a Western or Japanese studio would typically produce.
Taiwan: Rewriting the Horror Playbook
Taiwan is quickly carving out a reputation in a genre many would once have assumed belonged almost exclusively to Japanese studios. Red Candle Games, a Taipei-based team, has become one of the most important studios putting the island on the global gaming map with titles such as Devotion, Detention, and Nine Sols.
Red Candle Games' debut, Detention, was a 2D horror game set during Taiwan's White Terror period. It found an audience well beyond the island, and its success gave the studio the resources to pursue more ambitious projects.
Its follow-up, Devotion, arrived in 2019 as a first-person psychological horror game set in 1980s Taiwan and became something of a cause célèbre before many Western players had even heard of it.
Devotion launched to a 95% positive rating on Steam within its first four days and briefly became the most-streamed game on the Chinese platform Bilibili. That momentum ended abruptly when players discovered a hidden in-game reference mocking Chinese leader Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh, a political meme that has circulated widely in China.
Devotion was subsequently review-bombed, pulled from Steam, and abandoned by its publishing partners.
It eventually, and thankfully, found its way back to players through Red Candle's own storefront. Critical opinion of the game remained extremely strong, particularly around its atmosphere, storytelling, and psychological horror.
Europe: The Old World's New Wave
When Europe's gaming industry is mentioned, the conversation tends to revolve around the same familiar names: Britain, France, and, more recently, Sweden.
Swedish developers alone delivered five of Steam's global top 10 bestsellers during the 2024-2025 period, including Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, and PEAK, so this narrower focus is not coming out of nowhere. More broadly, Nordic developers have been on an upward trajectory for years, producing a disproportionate number of standout titles relative to their populations.
Finland's Fear & Hunger, a brutal dungeon-crawling RPG created almost entirely by one person, Miro Haverinen, has built a devoted cult following through sheer notoriety and an uncompromising design philosophy.
Sweden's semiwork studio released R.E.P.O. in early access in February 2025. The co-op horror game sold an estimated 3 million copies in under three weeks, attracting millions of viewers across Twitch and YouTube in the process.
That said, some of the most interesting developments in European indie gaming have come from farther east, particularly from smaller countries that rarely registered on the industry's radar before.
The Czech Republic's Ministry of Broadcast, Poland's 60 Seconds! and Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and Serbia's Scorn have all found global audiences and earned critical recognition.
One of the most striking examples of what two people with a strong creative vision can accomplish comes from Latvia. The Case of the Golden Idol was developed by brothers Andrejs and Ernests Kļaviņš, who make up the entirety of Color Gray Games, a studio they founded in 2021.
The game, an 18th-century murder mystery built around '90s-style deduction mechanics, appeared on numerous Best of 2022 lists and won the IndieCade Narrative Award. Its sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, followed in 2024 and received similarly strong international acclaim.
Ukraine's Frogwares has been at it for even longer, and under considerably more difficult circumstances. The Kyiv-based studio has spent more than two decades building a reputation through its long-running Sherlock Holmes series and Lovecraft-inspired mystery games.
The Sinking City was arguably one of Frogwares' most ambitious projects. Set in a flooded version of 1920s Massachusetts, it found enough of an audience to justify a remastered rerelease in May 2025 and a full sequel. The Sinking City 2 has been in development since January 2023, with a confirmed release window in the first half of 2026, and is among the most anticipated indie horror games on the horizon.
Finally, no discussion of Europe's indie scene would be complete without mentioning Disco Elysium. ZA/UM began as an Estonian cultural collective before evolving into a game studio spread across London, Tallinn, and Porto, though its creative sensibility remained firmly rooted in their original Estonian milieu.
ZA/UM's first game, Disco Elysium, swept The Game Awards in 2019, winning Best Independent Game, Best Narrative, and Best Role-Playing Game.
It has since sold more than 5 million copies. To call it influential would undersell it. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made and a landmark example of games as a literary medium.
Oceania: Down Under, Global Reach
Australia and New Zealand have, per capita, one of the most impressive indie track records anywhere in the world. One of the clearest examples is Team Cherry, a three-person studio based in Adelaide.
Hollow Knight, a hand-drawn Metroidvania released in 2017, has gone on to become one of the best-selling indie games of all time, with more than 15 million copies sold. Its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, arrived in late 2025 and was not far behind its predecessor's success.
It set a Steam record with more than 535,000 concurrent players on launch day, temporarily overwhelming both Steam and the PlayStation Store, and outselling every Game of the Year nominee at The Game Awards 2025. Yes, outperforming even Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
All this from a team of three people working out of South Australia.
Melbourne has produced plenty of titles you might recognize, including Untitled Goose Game, Wayward Strand, and Conscript. Another Melbourne-based hit, Cult of the Lamb, sold 1 million copies in its first week and has since become one of the most recognizable indie franchises of recent years, supported by ongoing expansions and a dedicated fan base.
New Zealand has been keeping pace, perhaps most visibly through Dredge, a Lovecraftian fishing RPG, which crossed a million copies sold within just months of being launched. It earned four BAFTA nominations, and went on to win the Supreme Award at the New Zealand Game Awards.
Wellington's Dinosaur Polo Club has built its own following with Mini Metro and Mini Motorways, minimalist transit-design games that have attracted more than 12 million players combined. For a country where sheep outnumber people by roughly six to one, that is an impressive hit rate.
Your Next Favorite Game Could Come From Anywhere
Barring the occasional Eurojank cult hit, mainstream game development has historically been concentrated among studios in Japan, North America, and Western Europe. These were the regions that saw the earliest widespread adoption of consoles and PCs, so it makes sense that developers tended to emerge from, and build games for, those core markets.
There have always been exceptions, of course. Brazil, for example, has had a thriving local industry for decades. But with economic growth spreading around the world and access to consoles and PCs continuing to expand, we are seeing a structural change in who plays video games and where those players come from.
As game development goes increasingly global, perhaps the most interesting implications concern authenticity and representation. Recent debates have often focused on whether representation is being shoehorned into games such as Assassin's Creed Shadows as a desirable "checkbox" rather than emerging naturally from genuinely interesting and diverse stories.
As international developers increasingly tap into their own culture and history for inspiration, we are starting to see genuine diversity and stories rooted in authentic experiences. Games from around the world will increasingly reflect the people playing them and the people building them. We are set for a fascinating decade of new games, and your next favorite could come from almost anywhere.