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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?
I have not played Black Myth Wukong, but from where I stand, most of the innovation in video games comes out of the Western world. Portal, FTL, Terraria (?), Stardew Valley (?), Slay the Spire, all of whom created (or refined, in case of (?)) a genre, are all Western.
Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.
My exposure to games from mainland China has been rather more limited. I played My Time at Portia, and found it mostly forgettable. Not something worse than a Western studio might produce, but conceptionally derivative. "Let us remake Stardew Valley in 3d, and get rid of the politically precarious 'megacorp comes to small town' storyline".
This could be sampling bias, but it is equally possible that mainland China is not good at fostering small indie game devs from whom most of the innovation comes.
With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in. If the MC has dialog options to flirt with half of the party members who share their sex, I will not be terribly offended by that, I will just not click on that (depending on the gender of my character, perhaps). Most of the core of wokeness, like the concept of white cis-male privilege is not something a game dev would touch with a ten foot pole. Much safer to translate this to fantasy races such as orcs or elves.
As the parallel post already pointed out, Stardew Valley is just a straight remake of the Japanese-made Harvest Moon - if it were made in China, it would no doubt be subjected to the same nonstop stream of "Chinese can only copy" slander that Genshin Impact suffered for its heavily-inspired-by-Zelda release region (which still was much less similar to the open world Zeldas than Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon). Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there). I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.
Right, these two restrictions together seem like they are designed to reach the conclusion that you want. A Chinese or SEA player (mobile-only) or Japanese (console) player willing to treat PC games as non-existent might come to the conclusion that the collective West has been a footnote in gaming (what did they make? Coin Master? Donkey Kong (a Mario ripoff with prerendered graphics)? Secret of Evermore (basically a reskin of Secret of Mana)?), and a Japanese PC player uninterested in casual difficulty would easily conclude that all Western games of note are late copycats of Japanese formulae. It's all too often forgotten that the narrative-driven 3D adventure shooter genre, which is basically the default for Western AAA games nowadays, is itself originally Japanese (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid...).
CCGs and deckbuilders are different genres. In CCGs building your deck is something that happens outside the game and everybody brings the one they want to the starting line. In a deckbuilder, everybody starts with the same or very similar decks, and changing the cards in it is a game action.
Even considering the digital CCG campaign mode you can see in the old Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon TCG console games - the kind which was which was pioneered by Microprose's Magic the Gathering - the meta-game (in which "an individual game of Magic" functions like the battle system in Final Fantasy or something) typically has acquiring new cards as a game action that takes in-game currency, but lets you shuffle around which cards you own in or out of your deck for free.
I can't get a good sense of how the Dragon Ball game stated on that wikipedia page to be an "early precursor of the DCCG" actually plays, but from what I can see from a fraction of a longplay and a wiki description it sounds like the cards are closer in nature to playing cards (basically just a number and a suit) than CCG cards.
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