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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.
What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
Elden Ring is basically a video game adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a German opera that takes 3 days to conduct and is centered around Norse mythology. Its primary themes are largely centered around European medieval alchemical concepts, it's fantasy aesthetic is western-style dragons, and its dominant architecture and clothing styles are so European that just about the only asian-aesthetic character in the setting is an obviously evil and subversive outsider.
It's like the least-Weeaboo game to point at as an example of Asian cultural dominance. Miyazaki is a Europhile if anything.
The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).
It's an interesting take but I think it's a combination of a particular Japanese insistence on quality, and also doing a novel take on something familiar - for all that Castlevania is obviously derivative of western tropes, it's really very different in practice to any existing version of the Dracula story.
There could be something to that. I recall being told by some Bloodborne lore hound that the blood communion religion of Yharnam in that game had all the imagery of Christianity, but the structure of the religion was based on Shintoism or some other East Asian religion, which is an extra twist on the "what if it turned out that the church was evil?" cliche.
I actually don't know the Castlevania game stories well, but that's certainly another Western-culture inspired game made by East Asians which has seemed to capture Western audiences. I did watch the Netflix cartoon, which was made by a Western studio, but in a style meant to emulate anime (itself a style meant to emulate Disney), adapting an Eastern dev-made video game that itself was an adaptation of a Western-made story. Which could have turned out interesting, for seeing all the twists and turns such layers of adaptation and copying styles introduced, but it ended up turning everything into slop designed for Modern Audiences, which is why I stopped watching it.
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