Chinese video games are on the rise, but I wish they got more respect

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.
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- Did that sound cooler in your head? "Chauvinism if you settlers".

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

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.

Haha simps for the CCP. Go fuck yourself Winnie the Pooh.

And there it is.
- I am not a fan of the CCP or Winnie the pooh. They are committing genocide..... call me what you want, I have no issue with the Chinese people only the ones on charge of the government. Bit keep simping for the authoritarian murders to virtue signal.
- Yes, there it is, as it should be.
  
  I say this as a man with a wife from Beijing and a son that holds a Chinese passport: Fuck the CCP
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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.

The absolute state of this thread...

Just crackers being crackers; don't even waste your breath on them.
But what about ism?
I think you've accidentally switched from your lemmygrad account to your for-conversations-with-normal-people alt.
I fucking love it, tells me exactly who to block so I never have to see CCP shill posts ever again :) Go fuck yourself and your genocidal regime
- I can't wait to watch your country collapse.

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.
- Ahhum Acktually it's not rasheism because chiense ishnt a rashe [sniff] therefore they can't be rasheist.
- Hating a regime that commits ACTUAL RACIAL-BASED GENOCIDE is racist, I guess that means hating Nazis was racism against Germans? You are a fucking idiot.
Which comments does yours apply to?

Because I am not seeing any.

Or is any criticism of china "racist" in your eyes?
Chinese isn't a race, its a nationality.

Pray tell, have you ever made an "America bad" comment?
- unironically active on c/conservative
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!
- Very insightful, do tell me more.
- aight cac

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.

AmeriKKKan chauvinism is strong with this thread.

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.

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.

I see a lot of comments in here that remind me a lot of this New Yorker cover. As with any other country, there's lots of different types of people in China with lots of differing opinions, but some comments in here feel like they're casting all of China as a monolith. I should probably know better than to expect nuance on the internet, but the amount of opinions in here that were expressed as if they were total undeniable truth was still kind of annoying.

Following up on that, the main point of the article was requesting that people not conflate the CCP w/ companies and players. No one who was born in China chose to be born there. But they still have to live their lives, find creative expression, etc. I also hate the CCP, but I was surprised to see so an article that was trying to distinguish between the CCP and ordinary Chinese people receive so many comments that just brought up the CCP.
All that said, while I definitely disagree with many comments in here, I personally didn't feel like I saw comments in here that were racist, despite what some people suggested.
For me, this article made me interested in finding out what cool games might be getting made in China that aren't being released to the West. I also found it disappointing that the article explicitly called out that lots of the cool stuff isn't making it to the West, and yet so many comments here talked about how China hasn't made any good games, with no acknowledgement of whether the commenter has tried anything other than a small handful of the ones that actually got translations and came over here.

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for reading and hope you have a good day.

If they want my time and patronage, they can learn how my community's melanin distributes across our bodies. They can learn how to render coarse hair. They can broaden their character demographics beyond 'what kyles are comfortable with'. Otherwise, they can fuck right off. And I haven't seen many Eastern in general devs willing to even so much as try. Mihoyo and Square-Enix are both kinda on my shitlist right now.

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.

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?

commies

You're right now on a server whose back-end is developed mainly by two commies, and whose admins are also commies (lemmy.ml).
- Allow the fascists to out themselves so that the reasonable among us can block them.
- No one said Lemmy was perfect, it has its flaws. But I firmly believe this will sort itself out with forks.
You mean the Authoritarian State Capitalist country of China?

They are as communist as the DPRK is democratic...in name only.
- So communist? Communism as practiced is "state capitalist"

I have huge respect for the makers of Genshin Impact. The story is simply amazing and makes you want to pay attention to every little detail during your quests (especially the main ones). The Gacha aspect can be ignored as you definitely do not need to pay to have a really good team.

I got some respect. They made a casino for horny teenage boys, slapped a coat of paint on it, and its somehow legal.
- Pulling off a game of pretty vast scope, supporting several very different host platforms, on a multi-year development timeline, and having it thrive in a hypercompetitive market is still an impressive technical achievement.
  
  If all they wanted was to deliver "casino for horny teenage boys", they could have done far less and still achieved that goal.
- Genshin actually has a surprising amount of horny teenage girls who play it, too. One article says its 55% male to 45% which is honestly very impressive.
I don't respect any developer that can't properly render melanin or coarse hair; or anyone who makes excuses for broke-dick hack 'developers' who can't properly render melanin or coarse hair