China is the world’s biggest gaming market, where a culture of creativity has flourished – so please do not conflate companies and players with a repressive regime that cracks down on individual expression
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.