Exploring China’s Explosive Growth in the Premium Games Market | Unpacked

Man is there an insanely complicated discussion to be had here… but by and large some more competition might not be a bad thing. And a lot of the games shown here actually looked kinda cool, since the games industry seems to have abandoned spectacle fighters at this point.

I wonder if AAA spent so long trying to break into China to make money that China came over here and is going to steal the house from under their feet while they're distracted

When Tencent purchased a majority stake in Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile devs) in 2018, the community was extremely worried about the original NZ-based devs losing creative control and the game being turned into the exact pay-to-win shitfest it was designed to push back against. What actually happened was that Tencent created a separate Chinese-only realm for PoE (complete with a few P2W mechanics but with the game mostly intact), and left development of the game for non-Chinese audiences totally alone. Their strategy post-acquisition is definitely more nuanced and sensitive to existing audiences than a lot of fans feared. The extra liquidity allowed GGG to push on with launching PoE 2 alongside PoE 1 rather than as a replacement, and the NZ devs have (ostensibly) faced no pressure whatsoever to include P2W mechanics in the non-Chinese client. All microtransactions in the non-Chinese client are either purely cosmetic or stash expansions, and both games function perfectly fine as F2P. I think GGG is an interesting case, and one worth looking into.

I support the "China will collapse any day now, trust me, bro" guys learning Mandarin from playing with subs toggled on instead of dubs.

Most of these games have an "open world anime girl gacha slop" feel or look. I'm honestly repulsed by them.