About Game Gyro

Game Gyro

Game Gyro, in Chinese Youxi Tuoluo, is a Chinese-language games-industry media outlet founded in 2013 and based in Shenzhen, Guangdong. It reports on mobile game companies, publishing deals, regulation, esports and overseas expansion for industry professionals, and organises game-industry conferences and awards in Shenzhen and other Chinese tech cities. Formerly known as 91 Shouce, it grew from a mobile-gaming handbook into one of the trade voices of the world's largest games market, chronicling the business of play — licences, launches, charts and capital — for the developers and publishers who compete in it.

Origins as 91 Shouce

Company records assembled by CB Insights note that Youxi Tuoluo was formerly known as 91 Shouce — “91 Handbook” — and was founded in 2013 in Shenzhen. The handbook origin captures its founding purpose: practical guidance for a mobile games industry then exploding with the smartphone boom, when thousands of small Chinese studios needed orientation in a market being reorganised by app stores, Android channels and the rise of Tencent and NetEase as publishing giants. Rebranded as Game Gyro — a gyroscope keeps its balance while spinning, a fitting emblem for a fast-rotating industry — the outlet kept the service ethos of the handbook while adding daily journalism, data and events. PitchBook describes its business as developing online platforms that help game fans find content and game companies find a place to market their products, building a lively game community around the trade coverage.

Editorial coverage

Game Gyro's reporting covers the operating concerns of the Chinese games business: company results and publishing deals, new game launches and chart performance, the regulatory cycle of game licence approvals on which every commercial release in China depends, esports leagues and clubs, and the overseas expansion of Chinese publishers. Its interviews and features give executives a trade-press forum — Tencent Games Academy talks on industry growth drivers and the metaverse, for example, were shared through Game Gyro with authorisation, while its overseas weekly reports track Chinese publishers' global moves, licence numbers and mini-game revenue milestones. The outlet also analyses player-facing phenomena from an industry angle: its reporting on Shenzhen's esports scene, interviewing club managers about why the city was “forgotten” by top clubs despite its technology base, shows its habit of examining the industry's geography and talent flows, not only its products.

The Golden Gyro Awards

Game Gyro's best-known franchise is the Golden Gyro Awards, its annual honours for the games industry. The fourth Golden Gyro Awards ceremony was held on 5 December 2019, hosted by Youxi Tuoluo; among the winners, publisher YOOZOO took mobile game distributor of the year and its title Mirage in the Flower was voted the most anticipated game of the year, awards the company announced internationally. Industry awards of this kind are trade-media infrastructure: they define excellence categories, convene the sector's leadership in one room, and give the organising outlet a central place in the industry's self-recognition. Game Gyro also organises conferences and training activity in Shenzhen and other tech cities, and its corporate family extended into industry finance with a Gyro Finance affiliate established in Shenzhen in 2018, reflecting the outlet's proximity to the investment side of the games business.

Investors and business model

Game Gyro attracted institutional backing unusual for a niche trade title. CB Insights records funding across multiple rounds, with investors including BlueFocus Communication Group — one of China's largest marketing and communications groups — alongside Darwin Capital, Xinzhicheng, Zhejiang Communications Investment and others, and a Series D as its latest recorded round. PitchBook likewise lists BlueFocus among its investors. The logic of the investment is the logic of vertical media in China: an outlet that owns the attention of a wealthy industry's decision-makers can extend into marketing services, events, data and finance. Game Gyro describes its services as spanning industry news, analysis of popular games, experience-sharing from renowned developers, and regular data analysis and reports on mobile game channels — a bundle closer to an industry platform than to a magazine.

Shenzhen and the games industry

The outlet's Shenzhen base places it inside one of the industry's capitals. Shenzhen is home to Tencent, the world's largest games company by revenue, and to a dense ecosystem of developers, publishers, hardware makers and esports ventures in the Greater Bay Area. A Shenzhen trade outlet sits close to its sources: Game Gyro's reporting on the city's esports ambitions, its interviews with club operators and manufacturers, and its conferences draw on that proximity. At the same time its coverage is national and increasingly global, following Chinese publishers into Southeast Asia, Japan, the West and the Middle East as overseas revenue became a strategic necessity under domestic licence constraints — a beat it institutionalised in its “going overseas” weekly reporting.

The market context

China's games industry is the world's largest, and among its most regulated: publishers must obtain licences for new titles, minors' play is tightly restricted, and content review shapes what can be sold. In such a market, trade media perform an intelligence function — tracking licence batches, policy signals and enforcement — alongside their commercial coverage. Game Gyro's longevity since 2013 spans the industry's defining transitions: the mobile boom, the 2018 licence freeze that culled thousands of companies, the esports professionalisation wave, the mini-game phenomenon inside WeChat, and the global breakout of Chinese-developed titles. An outlet that reported through all of those cycles, and whose awards and conferences punctuate the industry's calendar, holds an archive and a network that newer entrants cannot quickly replicate.

Position in games media

Chinese games coverage divides between consumer media that review games for players and trade media that report the business for professionals. Game Gyro belongs firmly to the second camp, alongside a small group of industry outlets, and its audience of executives, producers, investors and marketers reads it for advantage rather than entertainment. Founded in 2013, investor-backed, awards-convening and Shenzhen-based, Game Gyro — Youxi Tuoluo — is a representative institution of China's games-industry professional class: the gyroscope that spins with the market while trying, on behalf of its readers, to keep its balance.

Data, channels and community services

Beyond news, Game Gyro built services around the practical machinery of publishing games in China. Its own service descriptions emphasise regular data analysis and reports on mobile game channels — the Android app stores and distribution channels that historically decided a title's reach — together with analysis of popular games and experience-sharing from well-known developers. In an ecosystem where channel placement, advertising costs and licence status can each make or break a launch, such operational intelligence is the trade press's most saleable product, and it explains the outlet's investor appeal: BlueFocus, its communications-group backer, built its own business on serving exactly this marketing-industrial complex. The community dimension matters too — conferences, awards and training gather developers, publishers and service providers into a room where the outlet is host, converting readership into relationships. Game Gyro's affiliate ventures, including its finance arm, grew from that convening position, attempting to stand between the industry's companies and its capital as it already stood between the industry and its news.

Its record since 2013 — from handbook to daily trade title, awards host and investor-backed platform — also makes Game Gyro a useful lens on the professionalisation of Chinese games media itself: as the industry grew richer and more regulated, the outlets serving it grew from fan-adjacent websites into businesses with data products, finance affiliates and a permanent place in the sector's calendar of conferences and honours.