Asia Game Festival 2025: Arcades At China’s CICF Expo

Though arcade news has been on the slower side out West as things still gear up for IAAPA next month, over in Asia there was recently a major gaming event that had some arcade representation. For those unfamiliar with it, the Asia Game Festival is held as part of the CICF Expo, and is effectively China’s equivalent to the likes of Gamescom and the Tokyo Game Show. Unlike them though, its latest iteration (held from Oct. 2nd to the 5th in Guangzhou) has had a little more going on related to the amusement industry side of things, in addition to consumer/home gaming. Videos and photos have been only slowly trickling out of this since it ended a week ago, but let’s take a look at what’s there in terms of arcades.

Note: owing to them being a site advertiser, Wahlap are receiving the first spot here. Thanks to Ted for finding and organizing the information!

Wahlap

The biggest arcade representation at this show came from AH sponsor Wahlap, who held their WEC (Wahlap E-Sports Championship) finals for this year as part of the event. We covered the qualifiers for this earlier in the year, and like usual, the culmination of these championships has been happening at CICF×AGF. As you can see from the below day 1 highlights video (and this one for day 2, which is on Wahlap’s Facebook page but weirdly not their YT yet), they held championships on Taiko no Tatsujin, Maimai DX, Chunithm, Initial D The Arcade, Asphalt Moto Blitz DX, and Kingdoms Fantasy.

As well as this, they made a surprise announcement at the end of the show: they will be carrying Bandai Namco’s Wangan Midnight Speed Ignition in China. This isn’t totally out of leftfield, given Wahlap have already sold versions of Maximum Tune over there (and Speed Ignition’s online presences heavily implied it would come to China), but it is a little unexpected for a game that hasn’t even released in Japan yet. Also of note is how with this, China will be skipping Maximum Tune 6 (like North America, they have stayed on 5), which should serve to remind people this will be the version the West eventually gets.

Speaking of Wahlap and new arcade racing games, they also recently shared some good direct capture footage of Storm Racer 2, which can now be found over on the AH YouTube channel.

UNIS

As well as Wahlap, UNIS have also posted a highlights video of their presence at the show. This was considerably more prize focused, owing to their licensing tie-ups with the likes of Genshin Impact, but did have cabinets of their card games Picture Book Land and Amazing Universe to demo.

Others

Elsewhere on the show floor, there were a few other arcade and arcade-adjacent happenings at AGF, as shown in this post. One of particular note is 3MindWave, who attended with a small booth featuring a pared down version of Alpha Ops VR Strike (omitting the cabinet and only using a screen with the headset guns). They have shown this setup off before at another Asian event, and did the same with VR Agent at a VR show in Europe some time back, so it seems like this is simply their M.O. with some events where transporting a cabinet would be a pain, rather than this being an indication of a non-arcade edition:

By the way, spot the graphic in the background showing their other works, including those with Sega Amusements. Among them is interestingly Jet Blaster, which was branded as a Wahlap title, but had 3MW personnel involved due to it originally starting development before their studio was fully open…

Besides 3MindWave and away from their WEC finals, Wahlap also had a separate booth with Marvelous dedicated to their recent Chinese release of Pokémon Mezastar, and Bandai Namco appeared with a similar prize focus to UNIS. Both can be seen in the below video (as well as another look at 3MW’s booth).

That’s all for this quick look at AGF 2025, but before things are wrapped up completely it would be remiss not to mention again that there has been one event happening out West, namely BuckFest 2025, where the Big Buck Hunter Championships have also been running. We will have more detailed coverage of those once they’re all over in a post soon, but until then, check out the day 1 and 2 livestreams from there.

What do you think of the arcade games that were at Asia Game Festival 2025?

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