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Hi, c/games mod here.
I'm reopening this topic for the time being, after cleaning up de xenophobic/bigot comment. Please stay civil, remember to criticise ideas, and not people.
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China has spent decades building up their reputation of a place that produces cheap, inferior copies of better products and they aren't going to shake that overnight or even in a few years.
Are they even trying to change that reputation? The last I heard was that if you published a game app that was any sort of popular, you could expect it to be stolen and resold in China.
I also generally find it hard to trust any software produced in any totalitarian state.
If they want respect it's going to have to be through quality Sony or Nintendo type single player titles that don't have a gacha model that gets critical acclaim. Their own Breath of the Wild or Last of Us type game that holds up critically as opposed to being a game where "gacha mechanics can be ignored" in a best case scanerio.
But, most of the games that are well known games embody the perfect spirit of capitalism meant to try and squeeze as much money out of its users over years. Mobile gamers may give it a pass with how they don't bat an eye to how predatory mobile games are, but the gamers that the writer is asking respect from are less likely to give those practices a pass.
There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a """lolicon""" issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
And when I say """lolicon"", I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it's disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but """lolicon""" hasn't been one of them.
TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was "by otakus, for otakus" they aren't hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator
Why? The CCP is a defacto stakeholder in all Chinese companies. No fucking way am I installing anything they control.
Edit: Oh God the more you read of this article the stupider it gets. Shame on the Guardian for publishing this garbage.
Shout out to Dyson Sphere Program, technically impressive and gorgeous automation game with a nice sci-fi plot.
Shoutouts for my favorite Chinese developed game Gunfire Reborn. Borderlands-style Roguelike that you could almost SWEAR was going to have microtransactions. But no, it's one full price + character DLCs that is just start run, shoot dudes, complete runs. It got 99% good translations and a 100% mobile port! It's completely bewildering why this game didn't get treatment on par with Hades and Dead Cells.
Gunfire SLAPS for real
heckin great roguelike that my friends and i came back to recently after buying it back in 2020, and it's gotten so good!!
can't agree with the good translations part, but it does add some charm to it :p
I like Gunfire a lot but it doesn't have story and av comparable to Hades and doesn't have the replayability and difficulty of Dead Cells. A better comparison would probably be Risk of Rain 2, another game with a lack of story and budget art, that isn't as replayable as its betters, but still an enjoyable experience.
If a streamer pisses off china they get blacklisted from the entire Chinese game market. That's a pretty big neg for the chinese game industry.
Sure they have good games, but respect is another thing entirely.
Genshin Impact is good, and Honkai Star Rail, is sadly empty of things to go even though I like the gameplay better. There are some really good Chinese games out there, but they’re mostly on mobile and PC because the Chinese government wouldn’t allow consoles for so long, so gaming in China developed in a way that’s incompatible with how a lot of western gamers play.
Also, I’m never gonna forgive China for how dirty they did Red Candle Game’s Devotion. Or GOG for backtracking on carrying it because CDP didn’t want to risk Cyberpunk not being sold in China, and giving a complete bs excuse for why.
I mean, Genshin Impact is an outlier in games out of China. A lot of the games, even the big budget ones, from developers there are freemium or gacha trash (and Genshin only minorly avoids that by having a decent story and gameplay).
The first step would be to produce proper single player games that aren't reliant on a paid store model. There are some examples of that, but they're incredibly rare.
Isn't Genshin Impact also a gacha game?
As I said, it only minorly avoids the fate of other gacha games by actually having effort put into its story and gameplay.
It's the first gacha game I tried and it is good, but the presentation of rolls for items and characters made me understand how people can get addicted to it. People can choose to ignore spending money on it, but the free rolls is an effective lure for the types that can fall into the deep end.
Still would not want to see any regulation of it though, since it being regulated would be a move towards handing over real identities to companies to manage which is terrible. I do wish it was just a regular game with DLC expansions than at its core a gacha game.
Wow! Maybe this was naive, but I wasn't expecting this to get so much controversy and downvotes. I'll post a few thoughts here FWIW.
Anyway, that's it. Thanks for reading and hope you have a good day.
On a console, for an offline game, sure.
I don't trust my details aren't being sent to the CCP any other way.
Are you fine with it being sent to corporations? Because news flash, they sell your data to way more than just the CCP.
If it's on a console, sure.
What are they gonna sell, my play time habits?
Who are you that's so important that the government of China wants your information so badly they'll track your every habit through.... a video game?
You do realise the CCP data monitoring systems are known to be completely indiscriminate, right? They try to monitor everyone they can, as much as they can
What are they gonna log, your play time habits?
That's why I'm fine with it on consoles. That and I don't live in China, so I don't have a social credit file that I care about being affected.
PC games though? Whole 'nother story. People often use their gaming PCs for more serious stuff too, plus it isn't nearly as big an opportunity cost to later ship a PC update granting remote code execution.
who are you, Winston Smith, that's so important...
Racists really coming out of the woodworks for this one.
They always do. They'll claim it's not racist though and then the next breath say something about Winnie the Pooh.
...You mean the meme that Chinese people were outlawed from doing because it's not offensive to Chinese, it's offensive to the leader?
That'd be like saying caricatures of an American President (of which there are hundreds of) are racist. Even when most of them were made by Americans.
As a result of it being outlawed and how prolific it became, white supremacists started using it to disparage Chinese people at large.
...How?
That doesn't even make sense. They'd literally just be too dumb to understand what it was even about.
Ignoring the second part of Blamemeta's comment, the first part is correct: Chinese in the context of this article isn't a race, it's a nationality.
Okay, you're only xenophobic, not racist. The distinction is really important to us!
Imagine being illiterate.
Actually, you don't have to imagine.
Very insightful, do tell me more.
I hope you're asking in good faith. I'll try and give you a response as tl;dr as possible here.
Racism: hating people due to their ethnicity
Not racism: criticizing people (even of a single nationality or ethnicity) because of their politics
In the context of this article, most people in the comments are expressing privacy concerns over China controlling a larger percentage of the gaming market, and thus increasing the risk for demanding more data from the users installing that software on their machines. If anyone here were expressing racist concerns about this, people would be making disparaging remarks about yellow skin color or narrow eye shape, or something like that.
Furthermore, incorrectly identifying racism where there is none actually detracts from the actual anti-racist sentiment - in fact, the one I believe you hold - by muddying the definition of what is and isn't actually racism.