Alibaba Reportedly Seeks Buyer for Lingxi Games in RMB 7–9 Billion Deal
Five potential buyers have emerged for the bundled sale of Alibaba's gaming arm, marking the latest chapter in the tech giant's sweeping retreat from non-core assets.
Alibaba is in early-stage discussions to divest its gaming subsidiary Lingxi Games in a bundled transaction valued between RMB 7 billion and RMB 9 billion (approximately US$972 million to US$1.25 billion), according to multiple gaming industry sources cited by Chinese media. Alibaba had not responded to a request for comment as of publication on June 24, 2026.
The reported deal would encompass Lingxi Games's five self-developed game studios alongside two platform assets — Jiuyou, a mobile game distribution channel, and Jiaoyimao, a gaming goods transaction marketplace — effectively packaging the unit's entire operational infrastructure into a single transferable block. The breadth of assets on the table signals that Alibaba is seeking a clean exit rather than a piecemeal disposal, a structure that would demand a buyer with both capital depth and existing game distribution infrastructure.
Five Bidders Emerge, Testing China's Mid-Tier Gaming Consolidation Appetite
Sources identified four listed gaming companies as prospective acquirers: 37 Interactive Entertainment, China Ruyi Holdings, Century Huatong, and Giant Network. A fifth contender is a consortium formed by two unnamed private equity firms. As of June 25, 2026, none of the named listed companies had filed regulatory disclosures or issued public statements confirming their participation — a standard pre-deal posture under China's securities rules, but one that leaves the final buyer, closing price, and timeline materially uncertain.
The composition of the bidder pool is analytically significant. All four listed companies occupy China's second-tier gaming hierarchy — a bracket that has faced mounting pressure from Tencent and NetEase on premium IP and from hyper-casual studios on cost efficiency. Acquiring Lingxi Games's established SLG (strategy game) pipeline and the Jiuyou distribution channel could deliver immediate revenue scale and user traffic that organic growth cannot replicate within a comparable timeframe.
Lingxi's Trajectory Reveals the Limits of Conglomerate Game Publishing
Alibaba's gaming ambitions trace to 2014, when the group leveraged UC Jiuyou to enter mobile game distribution. A formal game division was established in 2017, the same year Alibaba acquired Guangzhou Jianyue Technology outright, seeding the self-developed content capability that would later define Lingxi Games. The unit was rebranded Lingxi Games in 2019, coinciding with the launch of Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Strategic Edition, a strategy mobile game that generated over US$1 billion in cumulative global revenue by April 2021, excluding China's Android channels, according to Sensor Tower data compiled at that time.
That commercial breakout prompted a structural elevation: in 2020, Lingxi Games was spun out of Alibaba's broader entertainment division and elevated to an independent business group, placed alongside Amap and DingTalk within the group's innovation portfolio. IPO speculation briefly circulated in the market.
The reversal since then has been equally sharp. Intensifying competition across SLG and card-game genres, tighter game licensing approvals from Chinese regulators, fading user-growth tailwinds, and repeated internal strategic repositioning have collectively eroded Lingxi Games's growth momentum. Resource allocation from the parent has visibly contracted, and the unit's standing within Alibaba's portfolio has shifted from a prospective growth engine to a divestiture candidate.
Alibaba's Divestiture Playbook Accelerates Into 2026
The Lingxi Games sale, if completed, would represent one of the larger discrete asset disposals in Alibaba's ongoing portfolio rationalization. Since 2023, the group has systematically shed stakes in businesses ranging from department retail to media, redirecting capital toward e-commerce infrastructure, cloud computing, and local services — the three verticals management has publicly designated as core. The gaming unit's limited synergy with any of those three pillars made it a structurally logical candidate for separation.
At the reported valuation range of US$972 million to US$1.25 billion, the transaction would price Lingxi Games at a meaningful discount to the implied peak-era valuation implied by its 2020 elevation, reflecting both the deterioration in China's mid-tier gaming multiples and the execution risk a buyer would absorb in integrating five studios and two platforms simultaneously.
For the acquirer, the strategic calculus hinges on whether Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Strategic Edition retains sufficient monetization longevity to justify the purchase price, and whether the Jiuyou channel can be reactivated as a distribution moat in an app-store environment increasingly dominated by ByteDance's and Tencent's proprietary channels.
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