Chinese Video/Computer Games

Eventine said:

Chinese developers should be paying attention to the wild success of Hollow Knight: Silk Song. The current competition in the Chinese industry over ever higher production qualities and AAA graphics is, IMO, not sustainable. Creative games with deep, addictive gameplay can be just as successful as AAA titles at a fraction of the cost.

Also, recently it was revealed by a Tencent VP that in the last year alone, there was 60,000 new games on mobile and 19,000 on Steam, for a total of ~79,000 games in a single year or ~6,600 per month. The Chinese government should accelerate (possibly with AI) the rate at which they approve licenses, or even just automatically approving new titles from domestic developers who have gotten at least one title approved before under an "innocent until proven guilty" system.

Yes, there will be the rare bad actor - and they should be severely punished for violating Chinese content laws - but IMO the current approval process is still too slow and holding the Chinese gaming industry back. In August, just 166 new Chinese games were approved against ~6,500 new games released in the global market. This is just too few relative to the size of the creative potential of China's population and leads to monopolization of talent & market by a few companies in China and a reduced market share globally.

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meedicx said:

1) Hollow Knight's success cannot be consistently reproduced; it's like a lottery ticket. Many Chinese Indie games like 情感反诈模拟器 or Sultan's Game have also seen success this year, but this cannot be the foundation of an industry.

2) Compared to Japan and US, the average revenue per gamer in China is still very low. There is still large amounts of organic growth left. The market is growing at 10% this year and can easily double/triple in the next decade.

3) Licensing is definitely a bottle neck. China should delegate game publishing licenses to select platforms and use it to promote industrial policy. Imagine if Huawei releases a Steam-like cross-device game store where they moderate all the releases and can grant licenses and then Steam is 100% blocked. This would vastly increase adoption of Harmony PC and domestic graphic card support.

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Eventine said:

Of course, viral games cannot be reproduced consistently, but that's why quantity matters. A ground breaking independent game is 1 in a 100,000; but by limiting total production to a few thousand games a year via the licensing system, China is shooting itself in the foot in regards to finding diamonds.

I think this will only become more important in the coming years, as purchasing power goes up and AI capabilities rise. You don't want a few companies monopolizing the entire industry and getting complacent because they flood the market with their own games and the licensing process makes it hard for start-ups and individual developers to even get a game approved.

Totally agree with China delegating licensing to Chinese game distribution platforms. China should be creating global alternatives to Steam, Android, and Apple store. It is stupid that Chinese developers have to pay a 30% cut to American platform companies just to distribute their games.

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qywi5u8s said:

Is this game fun?

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delta115 said:

The game to be like at little bit of this and that from all open world game put together in one package. Not sure how to feel about this, the similarity is a bit too obvious.

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