The company is starting to monetize its gaming ecosystem through game publishing, selling in-game items and providing other related services
image credit: Bamboo Works
Key Takeaways:
- Huya’s latest results show its long-promised shift beyond livestreaming is starting to show up in its financials
- For investors, the real bet is not on one breakout title, but on whether Huya can repeatedly monetize games using its streamers, tournaments, publisher ties and content ecosystem
After three years of falling revenue, livestream gaming leader Huya Inc. (NYSE:HUYA) may finally have found a new growth formula in China’s constantly evolving game landscape.
The company’s latest quarterly results suggest it may have found a better way to grow, not by reviving its old livestreaming playbook, but by making more money around games themselves. Its fourth-quarter revenue rose 16.2% to 1.74 billion yuan ($252 million), the highest level in 10 quarters. That brought Huya’s total revenue for 2025 to 6.5 billion yuan, up 7% from 2024 – marking its first annual revenue growth since 2021.
The momentum came despite just a 1.9% rise for the company’s livestreaming revenue in the fourth quarter. Instead, Huya’s big growth driver for the quarter was game-related services, advertising and other revenue, which jumped 59.4% to 592.5 million yuan. Its gross profit rose 43.6%, lifting its gross margin to 14.1% from 11.4% a year earlier. The takeaway isn’t that livestreaming is back, but rather that Huya’s newer businesses are finally large enough to become a major revenue contributor.
That matters because the market has changed for specialist game-streaming platforms like Huya. China’s e-sports industry still generated 29.33 billion yuan in revenue in 2025 and had more than 495 million users, showing the market remains large. But Huya is no longer competing only with longtime rival DouYu (DOYU.US) and other livestream gaming specialists.
Short-video giants such as Douyin and Kuaishou (1024.HK) are also pushing deeper into livestreaming, leveraging their much larger user bases, stronger recommendation engines, and broader monetization tools. Douyin, in particular, has lured top gaming creators and e-sports talent away from traditional platforms.
On the company’s earnings call, acting co-CEO Huang Junhong said Huya is “no longer just a game livestreaming platform,” and has evolved into a “content-driven …