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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Racists really coming out of the woodworks for this one.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 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.

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.