The Curious Story of China's Indie Gaming Scene

china is the future at least that's what people say china is the superpower of the 21st century it's the largest growing economy in the world a major player in global politics and a key driving force in much of modern media creation but what about video games china comes up in a lot of conversations these days but that rarely extends to the world of gaming and that's because for years video games have been almost exclusively about japan america and a little bit of europe for the last 40 years these were the only major players in the gaming landscape but for the first time that might be about to change in 2020 mihoyo's open world rpg genchin impact became one of the largest games in the world with 23 million downloads in its first week and for many people this game came out of nowhere it went on to become the fastest game on the google play and app store to reach 1 billion dollars in revenue beating previous record holder pokemon go by comparison pokemon go was the first mobile entry into what is literally the highest grossing media franchise of all time pokemon go was able to take advantage of the nostalgia of older pokemon fans in addition to its ever expansive younger audience and it was the first game to take augmented reality into the mainstream really it was a perfect storm of right place right time a kind of mega viral landmark event that only comes along once a decade and gentian impact reached that first billion dollar milestone in just two-thirds of the time any game that is that unbelievably financially successful is going to have an impact on the industry for better or worse and this isn't the only time a chinese game made a major splash in the last 12 months at the end of august the trailer for the newly announced black myth wukong got a lot of attention in addition to 8.5 million views on youtube and another 34 million on billy billy with a lot of focus centering on how a game that looked this good could come from such an unknown developer some took to calling it china's first aaa game but this description isn't correct outside of graphical fidelity nothing about this game is aaa its developer has only made one of a relatively unknown game there is no publisher and the team is modest in size at around 30 employees black myth wukong isn't triple a it's indie and it does look pretty impressive and trailers for impressive looking chinese video games are becoming more common it seems likely that this trend will continue and sooner or later these games won't just be trailers what's more already existing chinese games are playing a larger and larger role in online distribution platforms like steam with the final week of january 2021 marking the first time in history that both top selling games of the week were chinese and forget indies for a second what about the big boys tencent is the second largest gaming company in the world trailing only sony and their hands are in enough different pies to give the average baker a heart attack they're the owner of riot games the creator of league of legends as well as many popular mobile titles like honor of kings clash of clans and call of duty mobile and they have shares in many major gaming companies including epic games activision blizzard and ubisoft as well as distribution rights to many of the biggest titles in china as well as non-gaming entities like wechat qq tencent music entertainment and more many more actually tencent is the highest valued company in china with stakes in over 600 different companies and it just keeps growing so all in all when it comes to the global gaming market it can be said that china has now officially arrived and the impact of this is only just starting to be felt with how static the major players in gaming have been since the ascendancy of the current nintendo sony microsoft triumvirate the rise of china might be one of the biggest gaming happenings in years and yet the chinese gaming industry is almost completely ignored and that's why i'm here today to tell you for multiple reasons that this shouldn't be the case and that this subject is more important than people think and with the events of the last year it's also more relevant but before i can get into that we're going to have to go through a little history lesson so i can get everyone up to speed don't worry i'm a professional getter up to speeder and this history is worth it [Music] china has a long complicated and rather unusual relationship with gaming that most people are entirely unaware of sure most people do have some vague ideas about gaming in china the terms video games and china probably conjure images of knockoff products pay to win online games dubious mega corporations and chilling censorship but there's a lot more to this story it begins in the 80s following the death of mao xi dong in 1976 the chinese economy began to open up in a period that coincided with the rise of the home console but the likes of nintendo sega and atari failed to make much inroad into the chinese domestic market due to the high tariffs in this period all hardware and games had a 130 tax placed on them for being foreign imports which meant the price of these systems was just too high for the average chinese consumer at the same time however the now infamous incredibly lacks intellectual property laws of the country meant a gray market quickly materialized where popular consoles were reverse engineered and repackaged at drastically lower prices the sale of these cloned consoles far outpaced all legitimate imports meaning through piracy and knockoff productions video games were still able to flourish until the 90s where gaming faced a whole new challenge have you ever heard a parent complain about their child playing too much video games when they should be doing more productive endeavors like studying and being bored well in the 90s china took that sentiment and turned it up to a hundred by the end of the 20th century video games were regularly being referred to as digital heroine with gaming being blamed for the contamination of spiritual civilization if your child played games it was thought they wouldn't be able to go to college or get a good job games were believed to sap one spirit and gaming addiction was a real worry this situation probably wasn't helped by china's one child policy which meant many children grew up siblingless with few activities outside school and no cartoon network equivalent meaning playing games for hours on end must have been pretty appealing but these fears weren't just limited to the domain of a few outspoken parents on some 20th century chinese equivalent of mumsnet no this anti-gaming sentiment was a major focus for national media and in june of the year 2000 the chinese government finally said enough is enough won't somebody think of the children before bravely stepping in to forever save the youth of china from this deadly corruption by banning the production import and sale of all gaming consoles and arcade machines this ban stayed in place until 2014 when a chinese official was watching a game of league of legends where he witnessed a comeback pentakill in the 41st minute of the game remarking yo that play was sick what korea can do we can do better esports forever let's corrupt some youths and thus the great gaming ban was reversed and four years later china won their first league of legends world championship the official who has since retired from public service was once later confronted and asked how he felt about reintroducing so much corruption back into the youths where he replied worth gges report bot lane experts are still unsure what exactly he meant by this okay part of that bit wasn't true for starters the console ban wasn't absolute as some rare examples like certain nintendo handhelds rebranded by localization company iq were able to slip through the legislative net and make it into the legal chinese markets although their success proved quite limited more importantly video games could still be played on pcs with internet cafes becoming particularly popular and while there were limitations on how much time children were allowed to spend at them those internet cafes still flourished as did online gaming which ultimately led the government to introduce laws that required all online game publishers to incorporate anti-addiction software within their games that could limit how long underage players would spend on them this software would monitor people's play time removing in-game currency from players who violated their play limits while also forcing players to provide national identification to be able to create an online account something that is still common practice to this day unsurprisingly people found many ways around these measures such as by using a parent's id to create an account and publishers didn't always comply with the requirements to begin with and the grey market of chinese reproduction still existed people just had to be a bit more careful digital heroin or not gaming in china was still on the ascendancy and with the rise of mobile gaming at the end of the decade that trend only continued consoles might have been irrelevant but mmos social gaming phone games competitive multiplayer games and so on all found welcome homes with chinese audiences and by 2014 with anti-gaming rhetoric likely softening with time maybe because those once corrupted youths were now old enough to be calling some of the shots the great console ban was officially lifted sort of gaming consoles were once more allowed but they were subject to cultural inspections meaning the online services that supported these consoles were gutted and the number of games available was still greatly limited this issue is further complicated by license requirements to sell a game in china that game needs a license to prove it complies with all chinese regulation but in mid 2018 the chinese ministry of culture stopped issuing these licenses this impacted some of the biggest games out there with the likes of player unknowns battlegrounds and fortnight not being allowed to be officially published in the region in december 2018 the chinese government formed the online game ethics committee to more strictly monitor and regulate all games published in china but the new approval process proved slow and a major backlog had already built up which greatly impacted all who chose to publish games in the region with the likes of tencent the previous biggest gaming company in the world seeing their stock full 40 percent during this period as many people are aware chinese internet is heavily regulated and censored through a combination of technology and legislation commonly referred to as the great firewall of china examples of blocked websites include google facebook youtube twitter wikipedia and many many others really any place where information from outside china can be shared freely with people inside china is a problem however something that wasn't outright blocked was steam why steam wasn't blocked in china when so much else was is a question i can't answer in fact it's a question almost no one can answer even experts who have done research related to the topic are unable to provide any explanation for why this is to be clear steam hasn't just slipped past china's notice the steam service in china has been at least partly modified with all community features being blocked in addition to all games deemed to contain pornographic material being removed but otherwise steam has always been easily accessible to chinese audiences and chinese audiences certainly have accessed it by december 2019 simplified chinese had become the most common language on steam accounting for 37 of users the thing you really need to understand here is that in theory steam should never be allowed after all the strict license requirements that games are normally forced to adhere to were important enough to the chinese government that it was willing to suspend licenses for all new games in 2018 costing the chinese gaming industry billions and billions but steam allows publishers to completely bypass all of these requirements and the fees that go with them likewise censorship is obviously a big deal in china but steam allows games a way around this and plenty of games famously not allowed in china can be purchased just like any other on steam storefront also any foreign company that wants to operate in china generally needs a chinese sponsor company this is why nintendo had partnered with iq when it tried to bring its handhold to china but steam has been able to operate all on its own for years so it's a genuine mystery why steam has been allowed to operate in china all this time and it's one that might shed light on the imperfections and unevenness of china's internet regulation however regardless of the reason why the consequence hasn't just been more chinese players accessing western games it's also allowed chinese indie developers to make and sell games in and outside china this is what might be referred to as a game changer and the results have been impressive more impressive than i think most people are aware of which is how i came to realize that someone should probably make a video about it and seeing as i'm not sure anyone else will i guess that someone should probably be me fair warning though i am in no way an expert on china and so that is why i dedicated one month of my life to doing nothing but playing chinese indie games after all playing games is what i do best and how better to understand an incredibly complicated and nuanced subject matter than playing loads and loads of video games so i locked myself inside my house which is kind of easy when your country is still in lockdown and i ignored all social commitments which is also kind of easy when you don't have any social commitments to begin with but i'll have you know that even if i did have friends and wasn't locked down i would have done the same i also did my best to immerse myself in chinese indie culture i listened to interviews i watched documentaries as many as i could find and i read research papers and news articles not as many as i could find because some of them were kind of boring but i made a solid effort and that's not all i also started learning mandarin and i gave up learning mandarin roughly halfway through the first lesson because god damn that pronunciation is hard what the hell china where is the easy mode for this language still starting and stopping that's basically an entire arc for this month i also ate nothing but instant ramen one of china's greatest cultural exports it's filling and affordable this was my whole diet except for one time when i bought chinese takeaway from a fancy nearby restaurant to gain a better understanding of wealth inequality within the country i didn't gain a better understanding of wealth inequality i did eat some tasty pork buns god damn char sweet why do you taste so good most of all though i played games every waking hour of the day actually and if you're wondering i don't sleep very much there are many hours in my day this video that you are about to witness is the culmination of this month-long endeavor where i will do my best to squeeze out every ounce of worthwhile knowledge that permeated into my video game adult brain into video formats for you people to consume at your leisure and i did learn a lot some of which is actually a lot more serious than the last two paragraphs might suggest this video covers a lot of topics it's a bit of a roller coaster and by that i mean you might want to strap in because we are going places still one of the main things i learnt from all this is that steam or no steam chinese developers face a number of problems including trouble with securing funding unfamiliarity with localization uncertain economic prospects and then there is that other problem because even within the safe haven of steam there's still the ever looming shadow of chinese censorship and the consequences of what happens when that goes wrong but before that let's look at when things go right [Music] so you made a game and surprise it's actually good how do you then get other people to notice one of the biggest challenges most indie devs face in the modern gaming era is getting attention in the early days many big indie success stories came directly as a result of marketing pushes from larger gaming companies like was the case with microsoft and their promotion of the xbox live arcades but as the number of available indie games increased alongside the growth of digital distribution methods the time of indie games being rare or unique occurrences quickly ended now online storefronts like steam get hundreds of new titles every single week and not only will most people not play most of these games most people won't even see most of these games most people won't be aware most exist you see even with a good game you still need some way to break through that barrier and nothing tells the average gaming enthusiast that a good game is good like a glowing review from their favorite gaming news site or youtuber but even if the review isn't glowing even a bad review will at least make people aware of your game for an indie dev with a modest marketing budget getting your game covered by reviewers might be the difference between financial success and failure and most of the games i'm going to talk about in this video have zero reviews from gaming news sites a lot have no coverage from western media whatsoever most have some kind of review up on youtube but the average views these reviewers get are going to be in the triple digit range in a world where there are a much greater number of indie games than there are indie game reviewers getting noticed becomes everything and chinese developers probably find themselves at the back of the metaphorical queue when it comes to media attention because most will have no connections to western media figures or other online influencers and very limited capacity to promote their game at western gaming conventions which is where a lot of smaller indie games are first able to build momentum and limited marketing budgets and probably limited knowledge on how best to use those marketing budgets to reach a western audience and there's no established names or ips and sometimes more unusual concepts and cultural barriers for some of these games to overcome as well what i'm saying here is that getting noticed as an unknown indie game dev is hard really hard honestly and getting noticed as an unknown chinese indie game dev is likely quite a bit harder therefore maybe the games that can tell us the most about the chinese indie scene are those which do manage to overcome all the odds and break into public consciousness those games that do manage to get noticed and go on to be very successful the first of these that i want to cover is ic released originally in 2016 with 19 000 reviews on steam and a metacritic score of 84 that came from 12 different critic reviews if 12 sounds like a small number it is for a quick comparison to some other indie games from the same year with less steam reviews check these examples on screen now and i think we can all say the results speak for themselves as of recording this i haven't actually checked this myself by the way i'm not sure what examples i'm going to use when i edit this video because i was so confident that this point will be easy to prove i didn't even bother verifying it but if i'm wrong i'll edit in a humble apology on screen or maybe just edit this little bit out so 12 reviews isn't very many unless the game's chinese in which case 12 is a big deal as this video will show so why did ic get coverage well at first glance ic is a 2d side-scrolling action game with an anime aesthetic which might lead to comparisons to certain vanilla ware games like odin sphere or muramasa the demon blades if you were to make a comparison between these games and ic the comparison might not do i see many favors because while icy's action feels good its animations are smooth and its art style looks nice vanilla wares best have an impeccable level of presentation their action feels great the art styles are gorgeous and the animations are like being bathed in silk but see is more than just the compact little side-scrolling action game you see accompanying the player's journey through the world of ic is a narrator who commentates on your activities in real time but if that sounds familiar you should know that ic is much more stanley parable than bastion things get very meta very fast as the narration provides frequent opportunities to disobey the voice over by not following directions or by just doing things in different orders and your insubordination will always be accompanied by a reaction from the often frustrated narrator usually taking the form of them berating the player for not playing the game like they're supposed to the relationship between player and narrator often has a very antagonistic dynamic and this is usually when ic manages to seem most interesting without spoiling things you mess with the narrator and they mess with you back and the few moments when you feel like you managed to outsmart the narrator are i see at its very best generally speaking disobedience leads to alternative endings of which there are quite a few that come with their own trick or surprise and finding these is enjoyable but i never found myself blown away by any of ic's meta aspects the problem is i feel like i've done this player verse narrator meta match up before in the stanley parable and that's icy's biggest downside in my eyes in a post stanley parable world its meta narration doesn't seem quite as original or impressive as i think it was intended to be icy does have one big advantage going for it which is that the stanley parable has no real gameplay outside of walking through its in-game environments meanwhile icy can be enjoyable in its own right as an action game it is a short game but the action still has some depth with a combo system that increases your damage the higher you go and the usual action game mechanics like countering enemy attacks juggling an upgrade system that unlocks new skills and so on fights can also be quite challenging enemy variety is fairly limited but it's enough for the game's short duration and icy does like to mix and match what enemies it throws at you to keep you on your toes while forcing you to learn enemy movesets to survive the increasing difficulty of its encounters the boss fights take this even further and the act of killing enemies in ic is a more enjoyable experience than the act of walking through office corridors in the stanley parable you also have a persistent upgrade system that makes exploration more worthwhile so diverging from the main path to search out the weirder meta endings feels worth it from a gameplay perspective too and really i think using meta aspects to build on top of an existing enjoyable game is a much better approach than just using meta aspects to make up the entirety of the game but i still think the stanley parable's pre-existence renders much of ic's appeal limited for what it's worth i'm someone who never wanted a stanley parable 2 in fact i think the stanley parable itself kind of overstays its welcome if you try to find all of its endings if you're someone who did want to stun me parable to or just never played it i see might be a lot more effective however even if it didn't resonate very strongly with me i can still understand why icy ended up being successful because if getting attention is the biggest challenge facing new indie titles then games with aspects that people will naturally want to talk about might be the best situated to make a breakthrough and i see is exactly the type of game that gets people talking overall i see is a good game i'd rate it 3 out of 5 stars and yes i do plan to give out ratings in this video for every game i talk about at length this isn't something i'd usually do but seeing as i have many games to cover here and i don't have the luxury of spending one hour plus on each of them like in some of my other videos i think utilizing a simple rating system might be beneficial to viewers as a way to provide a bit of extra information about my ultimate opinions on each game so know that this rating is based on a mix of my personal enjoyment and to what degree i'd recommend these games to others and don't get too attached because ratings won't be a normal feature in my videos also don't take any score too personally no one likes people who take scores too personally and if you do have strong feelings about a particular score don't at me in fact do at me just do it on twitter because i always check my twitter don't worry that is definitely the best place to reach out for me in fact that's also the place to send any criticism of my pronunciation two for that matter love those comments by the way just make sure to send them all to twitter not youtube because i wouldn't want to miss them next up we have 2018's chinese parents a light-hearted life simulator set in china where you play as an average or not to average child from birth to high school graduation where you must complete the dreaded gaucho exam during this period you'll increase a range of stats by playing mini games and making key life decisions that will ultimately determine your future prospects the game is broken down into turns with each one representing one third of a year and on each turn you'll decide what activities to spend your time on what stats to increase through spending a resource called energy and how to react to any pop-up events there's a few more things that get introduced later like managing stress levels spending pocket money at the local shop maintaining family reputation which the game refers to as face and building friendships and potential future romances these are all introduced gradually and while it is possible to have a complete mental breakdown and end up disowned and destitute just like in real life this scenario is very easy to avoid and generally chinese parents is a relaxed and casual experience that's more focused on trying to have fun with its unique concept than providing mechanical depth or challenge and it's successful chinese parents knows how to have a good time this game is full of personality something that comes across as soon as your newborn baby first opens their eyes and is welcomed into the world by your oh so proud looking father chinese parents can be smart about how it represents life too one of the best examples of this is the face battles you participate in these occur when your parent encounters a neighbor or family member who they want to save face to about their lot in life by boasting about their child's accomplishments your child's in-game traits which you acquire through activities are then turned into pokemon battle style attacks to allow you to participate in this weird flexing jewel the gameplay for these battles isn't good it's basically entirely luck based but the concept is fantastic something about this scenario just feels right despite its somewhat absurdist nature chinese parents is also full of chinese culture like how at new year's you play a mini-game around accepting money from relatives where you have to balance refusing to accept money out of politeness while not refusing so much that they don't actually give you the money which is a custom that manages to seem relatable even to someone with no actual knowledge of the practice itself still most important of all is the way in which chinese parents manages to provide genuine social commentary on the customs of chinese parenting in a way that is entirely good-natured sincere and ultimately stemming from a place of love the chinese parents themselves are depicted as lovable idiots and while their actions might sometimes be questionable their intentions are always pure this game could have came at this subject matter from a place of cynicism but it doesn't within this game is a critical examination of the way a parent raises their children but it's presented in a way that is entirely wholesome and i think the game and its message are ultimately better as a result and this game does have a message because regardless of the culture you grew up in at some point during your time with chinese parents anyone who plays it will find themselves sitting back and quietly reflecting on the way their parents raised them and if you're a little bit older you might find yourself thinking about how you would raise a child or if you're into life a little deeper you might reflect on the way you're currently raising a child those questions are important and they don't have an easy answer which is exactly as it's presented in game at the end of my first playthrough i didn't do that well in my exams so my character became a game developer who once saw one of my colleagues being yelled at by a programmer until my colleague lost the will to fight back so now i cry myself to sleep at night because i'm afraid uh what is that all because i didn't do great in my exams that's a bit harsh i also failed in my quest to find love which is maybe a little too relatable for my liking also i like how the failure message for this follows this cutesy little being in love loading montage which makes for a great juxtaposition to really make your forever alone status hit you where it hurts still one nice feature about chinese parents is how once your character has grown up they then become the main chinese parent of your next playthrough your previous character's ultimate job and stats then influence your new character's starting position and on my second playthrough i became a specialist doctor which is for the record the rank above normal doctor and yet somehow i still wasn't making enough money to be considered successful and i once more failed completely at my attempt to find love well no surprises there but a specialist doctor ain't bad guys come on not everyone can have legendary professions like being a d-list youtuber i like this game quite a lot however chinese parents has a problem which is that the mini-games can get a bit boring the main mini-game involves this board game style activity where you select stats to improve while uncovering more of the boards as you progress through the game more and more mechanics get added to this allowing you to set up big combos which can be rather satisfying but the sheer number of times you do this exact same activity means it eventually ends up feeling like a chore as for the other mini-games they occur less frequently but they're often even more uninteresting to do repeatedly ultimately this wasn't a major problem on my first playthrough but by the second the density of minigames meant that things did start to drag and outside of the minigames there aren't a huge number of meaningful decisions or different events to really make each playthrough stand out either the only exception is which career path to pursue as each comes with its own mini story but that doesn't feel like enough to give the game much genuine replayability despite the great framing methods of each child becoming the next parent still for the small budget and scope of this game it honestly accomplishes a lot and i think it fully deserves its success as for why this game became a success well it was probably helped by how influencer friendly the concept is this is a game that lends itself very well to humor and it was covered by several twitch streamers and let's players with multiple million sub youtubers showcasing it on their channels really this game actually got quite a lot of attention in the west and with all that positive publicity how many critic reviews did this good game end up receiving you might wonder zero the answer is zero and i'm not even sure exactly why that is maybe people just thought this is the type of game you shouldn't give a score to anyway i give chinese parents 3.5 out of five it's charming and very likable i just wish the actual game part was stronger and that each playthrough was more unique our third success story is unheard an audio-based puzzle game released in early 2019 in which the player takes the role of an acoustic detective tasked with revisiting various crime scenes to eavesdrop on their inhabitants and solve some mysteries this works by giving the player free control over the timeline of events but then only allowing the player to hear the audio for one room at a time you then have to move between the rooms and along the timeline to first of all determine the name of each person present and then work out one or two key details about the crime which will only be apparent to you after listening to multiple different people in different places at different times i referred to this game as a puzzle game just now because that's how most people will view its concept but i don't think that's really the best way to describe unheard because it doesn't actually involve much real puzzle solving this is more a game about methodically piecing together the full picture of an event bit by bit it's basically an audio jigsaw you start with the edge pieces which is matching up everybody's names and then you gradually fill in all the rest to try to complete the picture this can be satisfying but it doesn't really put your detective abilities through any rigorous testing in many ways unheard is actually more of a narrative focused game than a puzzle game it's a bit like a video game version of the film rashomon a kurosawa classic about multiple people presenting their own differing versions of a crime in feudal japan where you'll only understand the truth through witnessing multiple accounts in this way each chapter in unheard is basically presenting a new short story to the player and then putting you in the role of the director unfortunately however you're no akira kurosawa honestly you're not even in the same league he was a bit of a legend and you are well you you're you still even that metaphor isn't quite right because you're not really the director you don't have that level of creative control so i guess you're more like the cameraman and i'm not actually sure who the cameraman was for rashem on but uh he was probably still much better at his job than you'd be but that metaphor still isn't quite right because you're not a competent cameraman you're more like a cameraman who forgot to read the script and didn't pay attention to their instructions so now they're forced to do their job with no idea which part they're meant to actually be filming but luckily they have the ability to rewind time so they're forced to go back and forth to try to just film everything with the hope they'll get the right part eventually and i think this metaphor has rather gotten away from me but there is a point i'm trying to make here which is that due to its structure unheard succeeds or fails on the strength of its narratives and also due to its structure these narratives might not be presented in the most engaging way as unlike in a film here no one has removed all the boring bits so unheard is an interesting and creative game that needs to feature some really great stories to truly work and its stories aren't bad there are five chapters that cover events like an elaborate art theft an accidental explosion in a police station and a revenge murder at a theatre but they're more good than great and when you're forced to basically witness the same story over and over again good isn't quite good enough the presentation is solid the audio quality is thankfully very good the english voice acting feels professional although it does suffer from using the same actors in each chapter as well as striking a tone that's a little more hammy than it should have been and there's also an interesting meta narrative to frame these cases even if that narrative does ultimately come across as rather rushed with an ending that feels unsatisfying unheard is also missing a few important quality of life features like the ability to speed up playback to 1.25 or to annotate the timeline as you go or save and quickly access specific timestamps still despite all this criticism i've raised it doesn't mean unheard is a bad game it's just a game that's brimming with a potential but it never quite manages to fully reach this seems particularly apparent to me after playing the dlc of which there are two but only ones been translated to english in that dlc the crime scene has two different sets of characters that both come to a hotel where one are a group of criminals involved in a past heist and the other are a group of actors who have come to the hotel to rehearse a script of a movie about that same heist and neither group are initially aware of the other and then there's an insane method narrative on top of that and it's pure madness in a good way this dlc really ups the challenge to the point where unheard does start to feel like a puzzle game because the unclear identities means you really have to work for every little bit of information in some ways this dlc is great but this is also the longest case by far which means it has the most re-watching involved which means it gets pretty tedious but after playing unheard and in particular dlc i was left really wanting more from this game i'd rate it 3 out of 5 stars on its own but 3.5 with the dlc this game does have an interesting concept and so just like the other games mentioned so far that might explain why it was so successful on steam but just like the other games that success still didn't extend to western media coverage with metacritic only listing four actual reviews still there might be one other factor influencing unheard success this isn't an indie game i mean it's actual developer doesn't consider it an indie game and that's for good reason unheard is developed by next studios which is owned and run by tencent and next studios has an estimated three to four hundred employees they're basically ten cents experimental indie branch and they have made quite a few games over the last couple years including bladed fury biped and crown trick several of which i played in preparation for this video but none of which i plan to actually cover because unheard was the most unique the most successful and in my opinion the best of them still all of these games are polished although saying that unheard does have a typo in the word ghost at one point and while i have come across many typos in the last month this one is the absolute worst because there are so few written words in this game and the word itself is on screen for absolutely ages so i really can't understand how no one involved in the localization noticed this still generally all of next studio's games seem very polished and that makes sense they have financial backing from the second largest gaming company in the world but even then unheard still didn't manage to get any real coverage in western media the final game i want to cover in this section is the most recent released in january this year dyson sphere program is a game in the same genre as factorio the actual name for that genre remains unclear to me the steam page calls this game an intergalactic factory in space simulation strategy game but what's in a name the point is the dyson sphere program is one of the finest specimen that this multi-name genre has ever produced it's a game about starting small and then going big you'll begin by mining minerals from the ground like some minecraft playing neanderthal child creature but you'll end by swimming in an ever expanding ocean of automation but you'll have purposefully sculpted to suck up extractable resources out of the earth's humble flesh that will then be rigorously refined smelted processed and assembled only to eventually be spat out in the form of glowing research cubes that you use to advance through an exhaustive tech forest which unlocks more resources and more tech cubes until you find yourself constructing megastructures that engulf entire stars to harness their every ounce of power that's what a dyson sphere actually is by the way if you didn't know and don't worry if you didn't know that i didn't know that before playing this game i guess i need to brush up on my kuros guscart videos i actually thought the title was some reference to the hoovers that's vacuum cleaners for you americans although i refuse to sully myself by calling them that because henry is a hoover obviously you cannot argue with alliteration and i will never betray henry i used to work with a henry the hoover not some disgusting human person and i have to say he was the most reliable colleague i've ever worked with if you're wondering how anyone could ever imagine someone would make an entire game all about hoover's all i can say is you obviously didn't know henry miss your buddy wow this section has gone off rails pretty hard and we're only two paragraphs in don't worry though i will get us back on track i'm not going to promise there'll be no more talk about hoover's in this video because i don't make promises i can't keep i do promise however that any future hoover reference will at least be firmly on topic automation is fun that's probably why people buy those hugely overpriced robot hoovers spoilers they don't work they've never worked and people have known this for years and yet they still buy them i mean come on you could have just got a henry and a maid you rich ignorant fools but people don't buy these inhumane monstrosities because they work they buy them because automation is fun everyone knows this why work every day by doing work when you can work just once to make something else do all the work for you that's like the ultimate american dream if you're still not convinced just think about it this way how many dyson spheres have people ever constructed without automation your honor i rest my case dyson sphere program is a game about exploiting the funness of automation it's a game about drilling deep into the human psyche to fulfill our deepest fantasies not those centered on money or fame or german bdsm parties no something even deeper our love for conveyor belts and logistics drones and wonderful shapely tesseracts of knowledge bequeathment i'm not sure if i actually need to say it by this point but if you somehow still can't tell i kinda like this game still it needs to be acknowledged that dyson sphere program has much in common with its main inspiration and factorio also has some important features that dyson sphere is missing the biggest being multiplayer but factorio also offers mods and blueprints and dyson sphere is also missing any form of enemy this changes the feel of the game to being a bit more relaxed and for some players that will be welcome but enemies in factorio do serve a purpose in the way they force a continual level of engagement from the player you can just overcome a lack of efficiency in dyson sphere by just leaving the game running in the background although the way in which the demand for resources continually grows in scale means this will never be an effective long-term solution for the vast majority of problems but if dyson sphere is missing a few features it makes up for this through some of its own accomplishments firstly dyson sphere is set in space and not only does building on your initial planet look really good check out those sunsets they are pretty fabulous but space also offers some really impactful milestones for the player to reach the first time you launch your little mecca out into that great big empty expanse of nothingness is really cool the first time you bring resources back from one planet to another feels like a true accomplishment and later getting that process automated feels huge no bigger than huge it feels large i haven't actually built a dyson sphere yet but even so the way this game scales up is even more impressive than its already well endowed rivals dyson sphere program's visuals aren't just for show either this game has really good readability a lot of the core gameplay in these games is looking at your monstrous constructions and spotting problems working out where production is getting bottlenecked and where shortages are occurring is effortless here and everything about the visuals comes across as clean effective but still aesthetically satisfying and thanks to the visuals i'd also say dyson sphere makes for one of the best introductions to the genre for new players and while the tutorials and guides provided are short they're still effective enough to get you going and the addictive gameplay just kind of takes care of everything else from then on for an early access title this game feels incredibly well put together and polished a few extra features might be appreciated but there's enough here already that this could easily pass for a finished product and honestly it's hard to understate just how impressed i was with this game and that was before i found out it was developed by just five guys for an early access title dyson sphere program is fantastic and by the way if my base looks like a complete mess that's because i don't start over in these games you can make something clean and efficient of course but i want to use this opportunity to speak out in favor of the opposite many people treat their first playthrough in these games like a test drive and once they know what they're doing they pull the plug and do it all again using their newly acquired knowledge to do it the right way but my friends life doesn't have a right way anyone can start over anyone can do things right if they press the restart button enough times but life doesn't have a restart button life isn't about starting over it's about continuing forwards i maintain my bad designs i nurture them i allow them to flourish sometimes they become not bad designs sometimes they stay bad but i embrace them all the same as a part of me because my entire life is bad design and i will never start over do you know what fans of these games call bases such as this what derogatory name they bestow to anything that doesn't meet their unrealistic beauty standards of efficiency they call it spaghetti and what i say to that is there is nothing wrong with spaghetti spaghetti is alright in fact spaghetti is better than all right spaghetti is the food of the gods and italians and college students who only know how to make like one dish but they make it really really well i'm no expert on the world but i am pretty sure this place wouldn't function without spaghetti wars have been avoided because of spaghetti spaghetti is what holds us together so yeah i think my base is kind of cool and i'm pretty proud of it what and all although not as proud as i was of my old hoover great game i'd give it four out of five stars but i could easily see it being 4.5 when it comes out of early access and honestly i walked away from my time with dyson sphere program being very impressed and a little bit hungry for some reason as for why dyson sphere was a success well this game has enough quality that it would be surprising if it didn't find an audience but i imagine being able to appeal to a pre-existing fan base of a genre of games that is still quite small may also have helped dyson sphere program has no metacritic reviews but it is still in early access so that's understandable for now these four games i've covered aren't the only chinese indie games that should be considered successful but they are some of the biggest successes and in my opinion some of the most interesting and so after spending some time with each of them what can we say about successful chinese indie games well firstly people may think of chinese games as being nothing but mobile games free-to-play mmos and games designed exclusively for a chinese audience but these games are proof that china is producing at least some indie games that have broad appeal and could be worth paying attention to for anyone with an interest in video games secondly for these games and others i've been consistently surprised and impressed by the size of the teams that have created them as i previously mentioned dyson sphere was made by a team of five but chinese parents was made by just two people initially with two more joining later and i see was made by i don't know i can't find that information anywhere and the credits were not helpful but for some of the other games i'm going to cover i do have exact numbers for them and the development teams tend to still be firmly on the smaller side some of these developers are also surprisingly inexperienced and my takeaway from this is that if these are the games being made so far then there's probably a lot more even better stuff still to come thirdly the lack of western media coverage particularly in regards to actual professional reviews is pretty extreme and you need to keep in mind that these have been some of the most successful and well-known games to come from the chinese indie scene i don't want to dwell on why this is and i'm not suggesting it's the result of anything nefarious but i still think this is worth pointing out and acknowledging and finally if anyone is looking for a clear and definitive answer to why some chinese indie games are much more successful than others beyond just the quality of the game the answer seems rather obvious and expected some games stand out the way they do this might vary from appealing to a pre-existing audience of a specific genre to having a unique concept to being appealing to influencers to being the kind of game that gets people talking but the point is much like non-chinese indie games these titles live or die by their capacity to get people to notice them so what about those titles that don't have an obvious way to stand out [Music] if getting your game noticed is the biggest challenge for a developer who has completed their game when it comes to actually making a game this is just one problem of many first up there's funding unlike in the west where many indie developers transition towards making indie games after already being successfully employed as game developers in china being an indie developer almost seems to be considered an entirely different way of life and most to go down this path seem to do so straight out of college often with no prior work experience at all this means they have no savings to draw from and no alternative career path to retreat back to meaning many will have to borrow money from family or take out loans to support themselves as a result it's common for indie developers to receive no salary whatsoever as there's nowhere for a salary to come from some games have been able to benefit from crowdfunding sometimes even from appealing to international audiences but even a successful crowdfunding pitch has its own requirements which can be difficult to meet for a chinese developer with limited means of course funding problems might not seem so bad if you know one day your game will be successful meaning you'll therefore be able to recoup all the costs you incurred along the way but there is no guarantee of this at all in fact generally being an indie developer is seen as a poor financial decision and multiple developers i've seen quoted acknowledge that actual success stories are very rare one developer who has made a game more financially successful than most still claimed they've earned the least money out of all of their college class they graduated with and one other developer admitted to having spent the last eight years making indie games only to have never come anywhere close to success with nothing to show for their time except that their last game apparently only made a grand total of 500 us dollars which is not a great amount for years worth of work so it's safe to say that for those who try to make an independent game in china they're not really in it for the money they're doing it because they want to create a game they're chasing a dream or fulfilling a passion but the costs aren't limited to financial there's also social costs to consider some devs are forced to move away from family to live somewhere with more resources or with cheaper living costs many don't feel like they're able to start a family themselves due to the hours they work and the lifestyle they're forced to live i've heard plenty mention of 12-hour days sleeping in the office finishing each day after midnight and only seeing your children when you take them to school in the morning each weekday and i don't know to what extent these are the norm for people but i didn't exactly get an impression that these occurrences are unusual this is also why many chinese indie devs don't just work a more stable job while making their indie game as a side project because they work so long already that they don't have time for side projects and after all that if you do manage to make your game you then need to get a license to sell that game in china which is time consuming expensive and very unreliable you can sell your game outside of china but good luck with the marketing networking or fostering a community because twitter is banned this course is banned youtube is banned and even steam's community features are mysteriously missing there are ways around this of course the main one being a vpn but the chinese government has started to crack down on vpn usage in recent years so it's still not exactly easy and then on top of all that there's also the challenge of localizing your game i don't want to regale you with a list or anything but i will say that i have seen some bad translations in the last month believe me let me share the most painful example this is button button up its developer started working on the game in 2013 and they clearly cared for it deeply however the official steam description reads quote button button up is a platformer party game players need to use limited resources to help their partner passing different laser obstacles okay not so bad so far some grammatical errors and it's missing the odd word but readable it continues the bros are going to share their will and woe to complete fantastic adventure by the leader of mr bunny this sentence doesn't even make sense and why would you use the phrase wheel and woe it's such a rarely used and specific choice of words the description continues further down the store page and it's just mistake after mistake to the point where it often borders on nonsense and this just seems tragic to me imagine spending six years of your life pouring everything into your game only to completely sabotage its chance of success through a poorly translated store page and i have to wonder are the developers even aware the translation is this bad this doesn't have the feel of a google translate job which means they probably paid someone in china or on the internet to do it for them and so they may well be under the impression but the translation is completely fine thinking about that genuinely makes me sad this game isn't that bad and at the very least it deserves better than this hey centrosphere games if you're watching which i can almost guarantee you're not for many reasons one of which being that i guess you don't speak english but if you are watching hit me up send me an email with some verification and i will give you a fixed version of the text on this store page i can't translate it from chinese obviously but i can take what's there already and make it better and i'd be happy to do that it would make me sleep more easily at night still the bigger point is that there are lots of barriers for chinese developers who want to make a game and yet they do it anyway and i think that's deserving of respect one indie game to come from china that didn't do too badly was candleman a puzzle platformer where you play as a candle man seriously what did you expect candleman's unique selling point is its use of light much of a game takes place in near complete darkness meaning the player must illuminate the levels themselves but you can only burn for a total of 10 seconds which is represented visually through your avatar getting shorter and shorter as they run out of wax this means that in addition to the challenges of normal platforming you'll also need to memorize parts of the environment during brief periods of illumination as well as use your candle light to interact with a variety of different objects throughout the game's modest five-hour run time it's a bit strange to play a game where your monitor's brightness setting is basically a difficulty slider but the overall concept is at least original initially however this doesn't seem like the most enjoyable gimmick to center a game around precision platforming doesn't combine very effectively with not being able to see where you're going and even in normal 3d platformers depth perception can be difficult which is why these games often feature such exaggerated and easily visible shadows so making a 3d platformer with a further handicap on visibility is a bit of a risky move also managing the limited resource of your light feels kind of stressful it's a mechanic that would probably be more at home in a horror game than what is otherwise a generally serene and tranquil adventure game it made candleman seem a little tonally confused to me at first as if it's not sure if it wants to be limbo or journey and ends up failing at being something in between but with time i realized candleman isn't confused one of this game's best features is that it has many more tricks up its sleeve than just using light and a lack of it for platforming as you progress through the game you'll encounter more and more types of environmental interaction or puzzle sections which utilize the bad mechanic in a surprisingly large number of different ways and every time the game starts to seem overly familiar something new always gets introduced in the end candleman is more successful as a puzzle game than a platformer and variety of puzzles keep it interesting there are some other problems i feel i need to mention though one of which is that this game only has two buttons jump and light your candle and yet on a controller these are both mapped to face buttons which means pressing both at the same time is very awkward and there are plenty of times you might want to light the area up while jumping because that's how you'll see where to land this could be so easily avoided if the light up button was simply mapped to a trigger it could also be mapped to a trigger as well as a face button even or just allow players to rebind the controls but in a game with only two buttons it's kind of shocking to me to make a mistake like this also you move really slowly and checkpoints aren't that frequent which makes dying more frustrating than it needs to be even though generally candleman isn't an especially difficult game but i still enjoyed my time with candleman in part because of its story which is told mostly through narration in between levels and focuses on candleman's attempt to reach a lighthouse he sees in the distance and for the most part that's all there is to it our protagonist is lost and alone in a world bathed in darkness and while they can illuminate a path forward doing so quickly depletes their energy their only purpose becomes trying to make it to a larger light they see in the distance something which acts as a symbol of hope but when they get there they find the lighthouse attacks them and throughout all this candleman keeps moving forward trying to light his way out of the darkness despite how briefly he can burn this is a game about struggle about not giving up in the face of insurmountable odds and when you realize this the aesthetic and tone it's going for starts to make sense alongside the darkness there's almost no music in this game and no other living beings for you to encounter this world is silent and dark with the only thing that breaks this up being the sound of your tiny footsteps and the fleeting light of your flame after listening to interviews with its developer and witnessing the experience of some other chinese indie devs i can't help but draw parallels between the protagonists struggling candleman and some of the negative experiences of developing an independent game in china they can both be lonely and dark and you can never be sure if the light in the distance that you're striving for will welcome you or turn on you if you've finally managed to actually get there and yet despite all this you keep going all the same hoping your little lights might one day be able to reach others and make a larger difference candleman isn't the best indie game of its type that i've played but this game has heart and soul and you can tell a lot has went into it especially when you consider just how many different levels there are each with their own new mechanics i'd give candleman a slightly guilty three out of five sorry candle man life is hard it really is one negative conception i imagine many people might have about chinese indie games is that they're lazy it's a fact that china's loose copyright laws have led to many knock-off products and cheap cash grabs over the years and this can still be true when it comes to video games of course bad games and greedy products aren't exclusive to china but i imagine china has a worse reputation than many other regions as a result of these laws and their effect and this negative stereotype might put perspective customers off buying or trying a game when they find out that it's chinese however nothing about my experience with these games ever confirmed this stereotype i mean sure rip-offs exist but you're not going to stumble into them accidentally the well-known examples are probably being created specifically for the chinese market and if you stick to steam you'll always have that much appreciated option of refunding still even when it came to games that didn't especially resonate with me i never felt like any of the games i played were low effort in fact i was often surprised by just how much content these games had or to what lengths these games go to to vary that content sometimes in ways that might be unneeded like the stealth sections in an otherwise 2d mecha action game still if chinese indie games do have a reputation for being lazy it's one i wholeheartedly don't think they deserve i want to talk about one of the exceptions to this however and this example is a bit complicated bright memory was originally released in early access on steam in january 2019 as bright memory episode 1 but it left early access in march 2020 with the episode 1 subtitle being dropped in the process bright memory is an action fps developed by just one guy the first thing you'll notice about this is that the graphics are very good usually the facial animations are not but the enemy models environments and visual effects look really high quality and you can even turn rtx on if you have a better pc than mine the second thing you'll notice about this game is that it's over it's a short game my playthrough took me 47 minutes and 20 seconds and that was with me taking my time by which i mean that was with me dying quite a lot 10 times actually as it says on screen for some reason i kept dodging off ledges and killing myself which makes me wonder how often is it when game reviewers say they took their time with a game what they actually mean is they died a lot i mean i would have just left things at i took my time with it and not trying to justify myself but seeing as the game is highlighting my deaths right here i feel like better come clean way to def shame me bright memory really though this game is short you'd have to die a lot to get more than one hour out of it and honestly this is not a finished game it's not even finished enough to be sold as early access in my opinion there's an industry term for when a game is early in its development and its developer tries to create a section of the game as a proof of concept that can be shown to publishers and investors to secure funding so the rest of the game can actually be made that term is vertical slice and the idea is that this one slice of the game can show off all the game's key features as they would appear in the finished product bright memory is a vertical slice just instead of being used to secure funding from stakeholders it's being sold directly to consumers to get them to foot the bill to make the actual game the actual game is called bright memory infinite and it's set to release in 2021 anyone who has purchased bright memory will get bright memory infinite for free and bright memory is currently being sold at seven pounds on steam this is why i said this is a complicated example i don't think bright memory should be allowed to be sold in this way at best this is a demo and the storefront should have to make that abundantly clear to anyone who is considering buying it of course steam's refund system does mean anyone who is misled into purchasing it will still be able to easily request a refund but as there's a chance buyers might be unaware of this option i still don't think this should be allowed however most people seem to disagree and have no problem with any of this the reviews on steam are very positive the reviews on youtube also seem to my surprise very positive and this game has even got some attention from some of the true big boys in the gaming world like epic games and nvidia who have basically jumped on board the bright memory hype train to highlight this game due to its one-man development status which means it has come to be used as an advertisement for the power of the unreal engine and nvidia in a look one guy did this with our tools aren't our tools great kind of way this isn't the only time i have come across a chinese game with good graphics that is pushing the boundaries of how early an early access game can be and it's not the only time i've seen a game get away with it either another example is bloody spell and where bright memory gets a pass due to being made by one man bloody spell gets away with it due to well in the wise words of the highest rated steam review due to booba and hey i'm not one to judge but boober or no boober i don't think an early access title should have nine pieces of paid dlc and it's also worth pointing out that bloody spell isn't fully translated into english despite being sold as if it is this is early access extreme mode and that's not okay in my opinion as for bright memory itself for something created by just one person this game is really impressive particularly from a technical perspective but i still don't think that makes it a good game the story is nonsense you're basically thrown into it midway through and there's sci-fi concepts like teleportation and super soldiers but also mythological and fantasy monsters and i have no idea what's actually happening or why it seems like most of the plot details are found on the steam store page rather than in-game and forcing players to read steam store pages isn't a great way to deliver narrative content the combat is the game's most noteworthy feature it seems to have taken influence from the character action genre particularly devil may cry judging by the copious opportunities for enemy juggling and the style ranks but in just 45 minutes but split pretty evenly between combat and cut scenes and environmental exploration i didn't have anywhere near enough time to make an opinion on the actual gameplay you do get both melee attacks and a range of weapons and the action is fast paced with the player being forced to keep moving dodging and making use of several cooldown abilities but it just didn't feel very good to me but that might be because this combat has some depth to it and 45 minutes isn't anywhere near long enough to explore that depth it might also be because i kept dodging off the combat arena to my death and i didn't even know there were places to fall to my death usually until i had somehow dodged into them but maybe that was my fault i don't know there wasn't enough time to tell and i could say more about this game but what's the point it doesn't feel fair to judge a game based on so little play time which means it probably isn't fair to sell a game based on so little playtime however as the result of one man's work and by the way it's a man with no prior game development experience this game is still really impressive and you could even call it inspirational and now that guy is making a sequel or new version of this game and if the trailer is anything to go by it seems incredible knowing all the problems chinese developers face this kind of ambitious project may never have been possible without doing something like this and people who already own bright memory will get infinite for free but i still don't like it i can't help but think there's got to be a better way to fund a game's development like by releasing this game as a demo for free alongside a crowdfunding campaign and i don't think going that route would have actually lost the developer money in the long run because if this game came out for free it would have received even more publicity and positivity than it already did although i can see how this path might have seemed more of a gamble so yeah it's complicated but ultimately i just don't want to see this kind of demo sold as a real game to fund the actual game concept becoming more common in the future and also in a video about chinese indie games i think it's only fair to point out that these kinds of titles do exist and that even if some chinese early access games are incredibly polished and feature complete like dyson sphere program some aren't really as with almost everything in life if something looks too good to be true it probably is so be careful what you throw your valuable money at and remember steam has a refund system and it's great so i'd rate bright memory a 1.5 out of 5. it's bursting with potential and i look forward to bright memory infinite but as it is currently my 45-minute breakthrough just felt like a waste of time so far in this video we have looked at quite a few games but one thing they all have in common is that they're trying to appeal to western audiences when you consider that steam still has a significantly larger western player base than chinese and that many chinese gamers have grown up in a free-to-play dominated landscape this makes sense but there have always been many chinese games developed primarily for chinese audiences and in recent years some of these have finally started to get english localizations one of 2021's best selling games on steam is tale of immortal an open world sandbox rpg based on chinese mythology i'm sure this kind of game isn't for everyone but open world sandbox rpg copious amounts of menus and stats that sounds like it might be for me tale of immortal hello where do i sign up sadly even if i'm feeling it it's not feeling me because there's no english language version available this isn't the only time i haven't been able to play a chinese game due to a lack of english localization other examples include path of wusha fate seeker and scroll of taiwu and unfortunately for me this seems to often be the case for rpgs which is a bit of a shame because when i'm not failing at becoming the world's leading expert on chinese indie games i often play rpgs i might have a bit of a problem actually however in addition to being someone who officially plays too many rpgs i'm also someone who doesn't like giving up so i found some games that were developed primarily for a chinese audience and yet will also translate it into english the first is amazing cultivation simulator a sandbox rpg that came out of early access in november 2020 and is all about cultivation you might be thinking cultivation what is that to which i must say bro do you even china no really it's actually a very good question in my notes for this game i wrote at the top of the page in bold at some point you're going to have to work out and explain what the hell cultivation is this seems important and it is it is important i knew this day would come the day i would have to explain cultivation in relatively few words to an audience who are as ignorant on the subject matter as i once was myself i have been waiting for this day i knew this moment would come for a while now and i have feared it but there's a limit to how much i can stall here so here we go cultivation cultivation cultivation sons of salazar is an early access sandbox adventure game released in january 2020 and translated into english in an update released in september of that same year imagine mountain blades but instead of alternative medieval europe you're in a fantasy setting with lots of sand it's actually somewhat of a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting or at least a former great civilization has collapsed kind of setting which when combined with the heavy chinese influences ends up feeling quite unique and the setting and story are actually one of salsa's greatest strengths of course this isn't the only difference between this game and mountain blade the combat is also very dissimilar and this brings us to salsa's greatest weakness battles are top down and vary in size between small-scale jewels and massive army vs army affairs but you'll always be limited to only controlling the main character it plays a little like diablo-style action rpgs or even a moba you move with the mouse auto-attack by clicking and then have a small number of activatable abilities but in reality this means battles mostly just come down to using all of those abilities on cooldown and hoping your zerg is statistically superior to the enemies sounds of salsa fails to really introduce any level of complexity when it comes to either the strategy side of combat or the skill based moment-to-moment gameplay but the big battles do at least feel kind of cool to participate in particularly if you find some multi-army madness to jump into to support the combat there are several forms of progression from character specific skill trees to a universal talent tree to equippable items to units and hero characters to recruit each with their own advancement and it's fun traveling the world and scaling up in power but the enjoyment of a progression is always somewhat limited by the simplicity of the combat traveling the world itself takes place on a world map where you can visit settlements enter dungeons fight enemies pick up items undertake quests and find an occasional unique encounter and there's a decent variety to the different things you do even if i did start to feel like i've seen it all by the end of a single 25-hour playthrough at times this game gave me a sydmeers pirates feeling and the world needs more sandbox games in this style it's a genre that isn't anywhere near as popular as it deserves like any good sandbox game sounds of salsa leaves where to go and what to do up to you and there are plenty of choices to make in regards to what character to create how to advance in game and there's even some branching quest design i chose to play as a spirit mancer because they were described as having the ability to concentrate pure negativity into damaging energy balls and i feel like my years as a youtuber have given me plenty of experience in concentrating pure negativity so this is probably the class for me through my time as a spirit mancer i learnt that spirit man says semen awful like what we in the west usually call wizards or mages and also that in games with big battles aoe spells are deliciously overpowered one thing i really appreciated about sans of salazar is how quick the game is to play you can speed up almost everything in game by pressing the control button and you can go in and out of battles and events in no time at all it really feels like a game but doesn't want to waste the player's time and i like a game that's willing to look out for me like this the story of sans of salzar focuses on a conflict between humans and a race of sentient fire demons called the ifrit the two races fought in the past with humans displacing the ifrit who have now re-emerged years later the main character is tasked with trying to negotiate a peace between the two groups but this is something that seems doomed to fail and the atmosphere the game evokes of an impending war that no one really wants and yet seems almost inevitable was something i really enjoyed the writing or translation didn't always seem perfectly clear and the story does get a little weird there's prophecies time travel reincarnation gods descendants of gods different realms different races and all this is drawing much more from a mix of chinese and middle eastern influences than western so i could never be quite sure if some of its meaning had ended up lost in translation but i still liked it quite a lot also i am not sure if you're supposed to finish the main story on your first playthrough i did and some of its final encounters were ball breakingly challenging honestly one of them i never could have done without heavily cheesing the ai and there's a limit to how much you can level up or improve your equipment so i don't think there was any way for me to get stronger at that point either to try to do this fight correctly but the story also incorporates reincarnation and all achievements you gain while playing the game grant you legacy points which can be spent to increase the power of future characters so i'm not sure if you're actually meant to finish the main story on your first run in the first place regardless the legacy points are a nice idea although i tended to feel that with one playthrough i'd probably seen enough even if i was curious about seeing the different stories of the other classes i'd give sounds of salsa a 3 out of 5. it's a fun sandbox game with an interesting setting let down by the simple combat but it is still in early access and even as it is currently it's well worth a single playthrough for anyone who enjoys these types of sandbox experiences gujian 3 is the third game in a popular chinese fantasy role-playing series but it's the first game in the series to get an english localization the steam page describes it as a quote mass 3d single person rpg and i think what the description is trying to say is it's a big single player rpg with lots of content really this is close to being a triple a game in some ways the graphics are good the environments are beautiful and varied and the soundtrack is fantastic the presentation can be a little uneven at times i particularly disliked how there are no mouth movements when characters speak outside of cutscenes but in most ways this game really gives an experience that feels high budget pc gamer once described this series as the final fantasy of chinese rpgs but to me a much better comparison would be the witcher because each has three games where there's a big step up in production values between each one with the first games having a much more old school design that the series then modernized the way from and where each series feels intimately connected with the country that produced its culture and mythology unfortunately gujian 3 isn't a match for the witcher 3 but i think the right audience would still really really enjoy this game the gameplay is similar to many japanese action rpgs combat feels good and has many of the features you'd expect like blocking parrying dodging a combo counter and flashy abilities although one problem i did have with the gameplay was that each individual fight feels rather slow and there are plenty of fights often against the exact same groups of enemies it doesn't help that for most of the game you only control a single character so you'll be using much of the same moves for the entire time outside of combat you travel for a usually linear world although it does open up more later when you gain the ability to fast travel between past locations and i guess i should really say linear worlds as in addition to the game's fantasy version of ancient china there is also a spirit realm and a dream realm that you travel back and forth between regularly there's also plenty of side content like a card game that i didn't understand well enough to understand if i actually understood it if you know what i mean if you didn't let me put it this way if i understood this card game it was boring but maybe i was missing something i'm not sure i was still able to win a lot but anyone who has played poker with a first time player that gets some good hands knows that you can win a card game without fully understanding it and it's really quite annoying to play against actually as well as the card game there is an in-depth base building crafting and resource gathering side area which gets introduced about a third of the way through the game here you can collect monsters which you can send on adventures or force them to grow vegetables and farm fish for you i'm not sure how they farm fish but they do so they're pretty smart for monsters i feel that word monster is a little disrespectful i think they're some kind of spirits actually and i'm not sure if spirits like being called monsters it seems rather derogatory but you do fight them so they're kind of monstery there's a fat rat he's actually in charge of all this side stuff and he is the game's best character mascot characters are pretty common in jrpg type games but i love how sincere gujeon treats the fat rats it really is heartwarming in a way he's not there to be the butt of any jokes he just wants to help out as best he can i found it adorable i also still forgot his name sorry fat rat i'll try to do better next time when not admiring the environments slowly killing enemies or messing around with side content gujian is about watching cutscenes there are a lot of cutscenes in this game and it's here the game started to lose me there aren't that many different central characters in this story and they just seem to talk and talk in conversations that at times felt glacially paced and that others featured dense exposition that i didn't find very engaging it became particularly annoying to me when the game started to switch to the perspective of the villains who almost seemed to get off on explaining their plans to each other and making foreboding comments which was fine at first but then it started to happen after every major cutscene and i just don't care about these characters i mean do something bad or get off the screen you losers i have sometimes had this too many cut scenes problem with other jrpgs particularly certain more modern ones but i've never had this problem to this extent before the story in gujjian was also quite hard to follow and combined with the slow fights slow conversations simple character progression systems and nothing else to really hook me it left me feeling rather uninterested despite the fact that from a more objective point of view gujian seems like a really high quality game the story itself didn't even seem badly told i really feel like there's an audience that would love this game and would be into the slow dialogue heavy style of storytelling it just wasn't me and over the long playtime the problem of the game failing to connect with me grew and grew i gave up about halfway through although i still really wanted to see where the game eventually goes some of its locations are so interesting that i feel a little sad that i didn't get to see the rest of them and that desire to see what location the game would lead to next was definitely the biggest driving force keeping me going it wasn't enough though i'd rate gujian 3 a 2.5 out of 5. it wasn't for me but i'm sure it's for someone whether that person would ever find the game is a different matter however in china this series is apparently very successful but the wikipedia page is tiny there are no reviews on metacritic and for what might be a first for me i couldn't even find a single review of a game on youtube so many small and obscure games have at least some reviews on youtube but gujian 3 doesn't have any so how would the right audience even find out about this game and i suppose that brings me back to amazing cultivation simulator so let's talk cultivation in china there is a genre of chinese fantasy called zyansha there is another fantasy genre called wu sha wu means martial tshia means heroes so wu sha is a fantasy genre about martial heroes wusha is a big deal in china and if you've seen movies like crouching tiger hidden dragon or hero well these are classic wusha movies they're about martial artists whose skills are so great that they can surpass the limits of what's normally possible for a human sianjia is similar to wushya but it translates to immortal heroes the immortals in these stories don't just live forever they have a whole range of powers meaning they're more like fantasy mythological superheroes the people who try to become immortals are called cultivators and these cultivators are often the central focus of these stories cultivation is about increasing one's power through ascension which seems to usually involve gathering powerful artifacts and extensively training your chi cultivation takes time it's a long and involved process and things can get pretty crazy in xian xia stories so in summary musia is like batman and jansha is like superman except possibly even more exaggerated the power levels involved can get thoroughly cosmic later on i'm talking creating and destroying planets or even universes these genres are also very chinese they take a lot from chinese mythology as well as buddhism and also in particular for zianjia taoism xianzia seems quite important to china amazing cultivation simulator is a xi'an's simulator but gujjian is also a xi'anja game i didn't talk much about his plot details but it's about a young immortal swordsman who tried to escape his destiny in the mortal realm only to end up being pulled back to the spirit realm during a period of trouble and the 2021 steam top seller tale of immortal is also you can tell just by the word immortal in the title despite this though xianjia is something that grew to popularity quite recently due largely to the rise of online publishing which is how many well-known janja series began and this is a genre that has become very popular with younger audiences however it's a genre that seems quite difficult to translate as amazing cultivation simulator shows at first glance this game seems very similar to rimworld imagine that game but you're now training to eventually attain the power to fight enormous monsters and destroy planets which sure sounds amazing to me but it's not quite that simple for starters amazing cultivation simulator uses the same visual style and gameplay foundations of rimworld but then once it gets going it veers off in a completely different direction this is a game much more about character advancement than settlement management or colony simulation amazing cultivation sim is much more rpg than simulator you have a big world to explore lots of powerful items to get and your characters are constantly training to try to ascend and my god is ascension complicated in this game i don't think you can really play amazing cultivation simulator without a guide i tried it and it didn't go well after accepting defeat and admitting i had a problem always a good first step by the way i then used the guide and it sure did help me understand some of it to illustrate what this game is like let me tell you about when i was trying to ascend to golden core to do this i had to craft my character a specific breakthrough room it had to be perfect i filled it with chi gathering items as many as i could which i obviously left for a long period of time to draw in qi from their surroundings i also had to make sure it was chi of the right element which is not the same element as my character it needed to be the element that feeds my elements elements are hungry in this game and of course i had to make sure my room had the correct feng sui then i transcribed every ancient law my characters knew while using inspiration i'd harvested from the other colonies i'd founded to learn as many stat bolstering manuals as i could to better prepare my character's base stats then i moved on to the drugs not for recreational purposes mind you this was solely to increase my max qi which is by the way the same excuse i use in real life so i ingested 15 red ginseng and 15 ganoderma that i had found while exploring the world why 15 you may wonder well because that's what the guide told me i wouldn't have known to do half of this without the guide then i consumed two rare earth flux elementals and to top it all off i ate one junk pill what is a junk pill you may wonder well it's a failed alchemical pill that i found in the trash that when swallowed burned my inside so severely that it left me close to death perfect i brought my character back to life using the chi healing magic of another disciple by the way one thing i love about magic in this game is that it often costs life span which may not be a big deal for an immortal but not every character gets to be an immortal and i just love the idea of being given a spell that's like hey this clears away the clouds to make it a nice sunny day only downside it costs 5 years of your life but enjoy the sun anyway i used someone unimportant to trade some life for healing no big deal it's what these other guys are here for then i made sure my character was feeling all right i made sure their mood was maxed and their mental state was good and their chi was fully charged and then i waited for the perfect day it had to be the right time of year to be in the right season and the right time of day to correctly align my yin and yang and the right weather to match my element which meant yes i did get one of my other disciples to do the five years of their life for some sunshine spell i mean it sounds worth it to me one of us is trying to get the golden core over here and then with all that done i was finally able to cultivate and so my character began qi shaping you only get one shot at this per character your success is measured on a grade of 1 to 9 with 1 being the highest only a grade 3 or higher actually gets a chance at immortality anything lower is considered a failure and it's permanent it took me hours to set this up this was the result of 40 hours of playing this game time spent being lost and then reading guides and then reading other guides and then doing everything the guide said and checking and double checking and sacrificing people's lives and this was the end result this was what everything had been building up to and how did i do grade 3 baby grade 3 which means there's still a chance at immortality one day so i did it sort of what exactly was it i did you may wonder yeah me too me too i can't say for sure what i did that day but i do feel like i did something good how do you get higher than grade 3 you may be asking no idea couldn't tell you but i followed the guide perfectly what do you do next you may want to know well two more breakthroughs are needed before actual immortality so you basically do the same thing again two more times except everything is harder and even more complicated enjoy i have never been quite so lost with the game as i was with amazing cultivation simulator but i had a good time it's a confusing game the tutorial is detailed and yet still inadequate it starts off pretty simple with learning how to cut down trees or construct buildings but then you get into chi absorption character fasting and fengsui and it's like having skipped a slide or five hundred and having no clue what the presentation is even about anymore and it can be hard to play the game when you feel so clueless for example i had a magic doggie who liked a in cultivators beds the game asked me whether i wanted to encourage or forbid this behavior i not knowing much about magic doggies but having some generalized knowledge about in beds decided to forbid it and it turned out this was not the correct choice but it really seemed correct i really thought common sense would do me a solid with this one but this game has loads of content it's weird it's interesting it's very chinese and if you're someone who enjoys learning complicated games it doesn't get much more complicated than this just know that you'll have to use a guide which doesn't make the learning experience feel especially satisfying also be careful which guide you use the first guide i tried was based on the older english mod rather than the actual english translation which meant many of the names for things were different and it really made the already complicated experience much more complicated than it needed to be still overall i do like this game i'd give it a 3 out of 5 but it should be said i'm a massive dwarf fortress and rimworld fan so this type of game is theoretically right up my alley and so what did i learn from playing these less western focused games well many things like how every part of a lotus plant is edible and makes for a great source of protein and how male main characters in chinese games always need to have ponytails even the grizzled manly ones and how sunflower refining law can accidentally result in male cultivators losing their genitalia a surprisingly easy mistake to make more importantly however i learnt that some things are hard to translate but that doesn't have to be a bad thing with each of these games i felt like my experience was made worse at times due to not understanding at least some part of the mechanics or narratives of these games i felt that on at least some occasions these games had lost something in translation however i also found an enjoyment in the unfamiliarity i had with their subject matter sometimes it can be fun to learn new things and often it's enjoyable to experience stuff you haven't experienced before when i was 15 i got into anime death note was this hot new thing at the time it was my brother who mentioned it to me and i hadn't really ever thought much about anime before this anime was actually way less popular back then but i was told this show was good and it was i loved it it didn't feel like anything i had seen before and this was true for many of the first anime i ever watched there was a joy in experiencing this completely new culture tropes that would one day annoy me back then seemed charming stories concepts and characters seemed different to what i was used to which made them much more unpredictable and exciting honestly it was great i don't usually watch anime anymore i haven't for years the magic kind of wore off because it was really the joy of finding something completely new that was what i was actually into more so than anime itself and you don't often get to experience something like that very often but playing all these games particularly those in this section meant i was regularly reminded of my first experiences with anime of the joy of finding something that truly felt new something is lost in translation but maybe something might also be gained in being lost at least that seems to be the case for me there's a problem these games face with coming to the west however it's a catch-22 situation these types of games often don't get released outside of china because they're not popular enough outside of china but the reason they're not popular enough is because they never get released it's a self-fulfilling cycle but now it seems that's finally starting to change i can't help but draw comparisons here to older japanese rpgs there was a time when final fantasy wasn't popular enough to get released outside of japan back in the nes and super nes days only final fantasy 1 4 and 6 got global releases 2 3 and 5 didn't make the cuts and that was true for many jrpgs back then keep in mind here that the hard part of making the game was already done but even then the publisher still didn't consider it worth it to just translate these games and sell them in different regions they were just too weird too japanese and trying to sell them in the west was seen as too risky and now look at things the weebs are everywhere and the idea that a mainstream japanese rpg can't sell outside japan just seems ridiculous well why should china be any different in many ways the future of these genres of games in western markets is reliant on the early examples that do get english releases as these are what will pave the way for later titles and the more games that get localized the more choice western consumers have and the more sales potential chinese developers have it's something that could benefit everyone so far we have talked a lot about the problems facing chinese developers but we haven't talked much about the most important one after the second world war and the chinese civil war taiwan came under the control of the republic of china armed forces in what became the longest period of martial law in history this period was named the white terror and during this era of government crackdown against anyone suspected of being a communist sympathizer 140 000 taiwanese citizens were imprisoned and three thousand to four thousand were executed this is the backdrop of red candle games 2017 taiwanese horror point-and-click adventure game detention in it you play as ray a young girl who finds herself trapped in a school as her once familiar day-to-day reality quickly turns to nightmare you explore a number of atmospheric hand-painted environments solving puzzles and occasionally avoiding enemies as you slowly piece together the series of events that have led to this situation in terms of gameplay the tension is simplistic but its story is anything but what starts as a cliche and seemingly uninspired premise of being stuck in a creepy school with creepy supernatural stuff happening around you is revealed to be much much more every horror element in this game has deeper symbolic meaning the reason behind this situation is revealed to be personal and tragic and the horror of detention is as much about the disturbing real world events which inspired it as it is anything creepy that occurs on screen i don't want to say too much about the story itself for risk of spoiling it but i will say that there are many horror games that are successful as games in my opinion but there are few that manage to also succeed as actual stories and detention is one of the best horror narratives i've played through in a video game you're pulled into the experience through clever sound design and visuals only to be told a story that you probably won't even realize is being told to you until the curtains start to be pulled back and the realization of this game's full implications are left to just wash over you it's powerful i got a lot of silent hill 2 vibes from detention and i'm not sure if i really need to say it but that's a pretty big compliment in my eyes furthermore if some of the previous games in this video might have suffered as a result of poor localizations or confusing subject matter the tension doesn't have these problems at all the important aspects of horror are universal they're able to speak across language or cultural barriers and any awkwardness in translation or issues regarding unfamiliarity only serve to heighten the surreal and uncomfortable feeling the tension is so effective at evoking i guess i can't abandon the ratings this deep into the video so detention gets a 4.5 out of 5. i really did enjoy the story that much and the adventure game mechanics and enemies you encounter serve a useful purpose while not overstaying their welcome if you want a horror game that's heavy on the game part the tension might be a little disappointing but otherwise this title is well worth checking out for any fans of the genre also yes i am aware that this is a taiwanese game in a video about chinese indie games and that these shouldn't necessarily be conflated but by including this sentence i am trying to at least acknowledge that and beyond this i'm not sure we really need to get into that discussion this video is getting into enough different topics already so let's leave that particular complicated discussion for another day maybe detention was an important game for taiwan and it's been adapted into both a live action film and a netflix tv drama it also received plenty of attention from western media with a whopping 18 reviews on metacritic wow that's almost as much as a non-chinese language indie game and this level of popularity might receive except actually no it's it's not it's still not really close but it is better than any other game in this video for developer red candle games the future must have seemed bright and their next game devotion another horror game set in 1980s taiwan and released in early 2019 launched to an even more positive reception until one week after its release when it was deleted from the internet after text was discovered in game that contained the words ji jinping winnie the pooh a reference to a chinese internet meme that compares the secretary general of china to the yellow cartoon teddy bear the xi jinping reference was found two days after devotion released bread's candle games responded by immediately patching out the offending art asset and releasing a statement explaining how the original item was only a placeholder which was meant to have been removed before the game's official release but that wasn't enough in less than one week after the game was first released devotion was removed from steam it has never returned to another store since i had trouble with one of the videos on my channel once it was a retrospective on the dragon age series and it's a good video you should probably check it out if you haven't watched it it's got a typo in the title screen retrospective not great but otherwise the video is good however after being my most successful video of all time and racing away to half a million views in just under a month the video was demonetized and later made restricted i didn't know why this was the automatic reason given was harmful language but after i requested a manual review it was changed to violence there is some violence in the video it's about a video game after all but nothing that seemed especially bad but youtube's rules are what they are after the video was demonetised i soon found more of my videos started to be demonetised and almost overnight my channels were a big drop in views to me this was very sad i had worked incredibly hard on this video i was proud of the results and i was overjoyed to see it be so successful i felt like i had finally made it it was the first month where the money i received from youtube was enough for me to technically live on and for me this was a big deal but then it was demonetized and then lots more of my videos were demonetized and eventually the video was just effectively gone i spent a long time trying to find out exactly what was wrong with this video and what i could do to fix it i spoke with multiple support staff at google they were nice to me they also didn't help eventually i took the original video file blurred every scene that could possibly be considered too violent and then re-uploaded the video in december last year and everything was fine until it wasn't the same thing happened again i reached out to google immediately and spoke with multiple support staff all of them were nice to me none of them could help me and as my futile attempts at saving my video grew more and more desperate eventually i got passed on and on to more and more support staff until finally one of them told me the real problem with the video at 1 hour 18 minutes and 21 seconds into it there is a word it's the word on screen right now i'm not going to say this word out loud in this video but the word is a reference to a race in dragon age the qunari and this is the word for this race's belief system anyway the youtube algorithm that detects hate speech must have misheard this word and confused it for something else in google's defense a platform as large as youtube needs some kind of automated system to detect things like hate speech and i guess these kinds of algorithms aren't perfect but when you're dealing with this quantity of content they probably still need to exist in some form and i have since been able to get the dragon age video re-monetized it's not restricted in any way currently and i got a lot of my other videos remonetized too the channel is in a really healthy state when it comes to demonetization currently and also everyone i spoke to at google was nice to me i was probably the least nice person involved you have to understand though for me this experience was awful what really made it so bad was how i went from feeling like i'd finally got somewhere with my channel and being over the moon with how the video was doing so then having all of that success suddenly pulled out from under me without knowing why and now everything was bad and maybe my channel would never do as well again making videos on youtube can mess with your head a bit during the best of times and the times that followed weren't exactly the best and then faced with this problem i was left trying to solve it by going against this faceless mega corporation that by comparison i am completely irrelevant next to the hopelessness of this situation really got to me and it took me six months by the way to actually get this problem resolved i was devastated to see a video i worked on for months disappear after my modest level of success so imagine what it must be like to work with a team of people for years on a video game and then you release it and it achieves much more than a modest level of success and then your game's just gone and there's no way for you to sell it and you've still got overheads to pay and your publisher cut ties with you and are holding you liable for their financial losses what the censorship from an oppressive government regime is scary it doesn't even need saying that the idea of censoring people for criticizing a public official is deeply wrong donald trump was recently the president of the united states i am not an american citizen i also decided a while back that maybe i don't need a great deal of american political discourse in my life and yet over the last four years i have still seen more criticism of donald trump than i have seen criticism for any other person in history so imagine we lived in a world where any and all criticism of figures like leaders of states or governments themselves was illegal and strictly censored this is a problem in china and it's one that must loom over many developers really this is a problem that extends far beyond just the world of video games but in a video about chinese indie games censorship needs to be acknowledged it makes sense to me how if there is something in a game on steam that the chinese government doesn't approve of steam would ultimately remove it i don't like it but it does make sense steam has operated in china without official approval for years valve therefore likely doesn't want to do anything which might upset the chinese government for fear of it leading to steam's access being restricted within the country that would be bad for valve themselves but it would be bad for many others too including both consumers and developers the situation with devotion on steam is terrible but it makes sense however in december 20 2020 almost two years after the game was first removed red candle games and gog announced that devotion would be coming to the gog store that month this would be the first time people outside of taiwan would have a chance to play the game since it was on steam and a lot of people were excited and yet on the same day gog announced this they later reversed their decision providing a completely ridiculous statement about how this was the result of messages from gamers around this time cd projekt red the owners of gog were going through a little bit of their own controversy with the launch of cyberpunk 2077 this company wouldn't have wanted any more negative publicity during this period and the decision to no longer bring devotion to their store obviously produced an overwhelmingly negative response from everyone who paid attention and yet they removed the game anyway but why gog doesn't operate in china gog and cd project aren't chinese companies and they don't have any connections to chinese companies that i can find so why would they do this and how can the chinese government exert this kind of power over a company outside of china who are only trying to sell an already censored game to a western audience this situation is genuinely concerning and for a long time it seemed like devotion might never be sold again until two months ago when out of nowhere red candle games open their own digital storefront that offers a drm free version of the game which can be freely purchased by anyone outside of china so after a long period of waiting i have finally played devotion and it's good the game is very similar to detention except first person instead of 2d and set in an apartment building rather than a school which makes it easy to draw comparisons with certain other horror titles like pt or layers of fear devotion might be considered a louder game than its predecessor it has more jump scares more gore and more overtly disturbing elements the story follows a husband and wife who move into an apartment together in taipei and have a child only for things to end up going very very wrong you'll journey through this apartment in multiple different time periods solving simple puzzles that usually involve making a change in the apartment in one time period to unlock something in a different period when it comes to puzzles and gameplay this game is even more simplistic than its predecessor but much of my previous praise for detention still applies to devotion i did feel that detention felt more unexpected whereas devotion was using a lot of the same narrative tricks that didn't quite feel as effective to me when experiencing them for a second time but regardless devotion is still a very high quality game and the production values in particular have seen a massive step up i was particularly impressed by a playable storybook segment which just goes so far above and beyond what you'd expect in a game of this type it's very what remains of edith finch and the way devotion contrasts some of its childlike and innocent moments in imagery with the other more disturbing parts of the game worked very well this game is also still very culturally taiwanese particularly in regards to its apparently very authentic environments and the way it deals with issues surrounding mental health and superstition but i wouldn't want to say more than that for fear of spoiling anything i had to give devotion four out of five although this rating system is starting to feel a little unnecessary by this point because we have bigger fish to fry [Music] almost everything i've talked about in this video has in some way been related to steam it's because of steam that i was able to make this video every game featured except devotion i bought on steam with the lack of western media coverage most chinese indie games receive i didn't hear about most of these games the conventional way for most of them i found them through steam's top sellers lists and almost all of the others i found through steam curators or publisher collections also with the difficulties chinese indie devs face in securing funding steam's early access becomes the only way some of these games could ever receive the funding they need to be completed and with the increased revenue that comes with the access to the international markets theme provides there's also a much larger incentive for chinese developers to localize their games and for people in china to actually pursue a path in game development to begin with and then there's the question of profit the steam store takes a cut of 30 and this was the subject of much discussion during the epic store burst steam debate with epic stating this high fee was their primary motivation for wanting to offer a competing platform but any game sold in china through official means faces a flat 50 fee and for a chinese developer struggling to make ends meet that difference between 30 and 50 could potentially be life-changing and if all these reasons aren't enough steam also provides a way to circumvent chinese censorship strict governmental regulation and all the many problems that come with trying to acquire an official license of course steam's not an infallible way around these problems the story of devotion provides clear evidence of that but it plays a crucial role nonetheless what is and isn't allowed in china is complicated everyone has probably heard of some of the stranger examples of chinese censorship in gaming the best known probably being the outlawing of skeletons but this isn't because chinese gaming regulations say no skeletons allowed in big bold text it's because of a rule that says games can't feature anything that promotes cults or superstitions how exactly do skeletons promote cults or superstitions is something i don't know i couldn't find that out and what else promotes cults or superstitions is again something i couldn't say and i have read a translation of the online game ethics committee's guidance these rules are deliberately vague others include not allowing anything that harms the nation's reputation or that promotes violence or harms chinese culture and depending on how you interpret these they could potentially include all sorts of things this issue isn't as simple as just not criticizing the government and avoiding winnie the pooh memes and even for those who want to comply with the regulations it's not always easy to understand how for some examples of games which have faced issues with acquiring a license square enix's open world crime drama sleeping dogs wasn't allowed because it was set in hong kong shenmue 3 wasn't allowed until it changed all of its real life locations to fictional variants because you are not allowed to feature real-life chinese locations in a game and risk of rain 2 developer hoppu games has spoken about the trouble they had getting their game approved because some of the items you pick up have a red effect on the icons and red is the color of blood so they had to change the color which is easy enough to actually do but you still need to go through the process of submitting your game for a license and then waiting to hear back which can take months or even years only to then find out one little thing needs to be changed which means you need to update the game and then submit it for review all over again and then there's also the cost each application has a fee of 10 000 rmb which is just over 1 500 and you need a separate application for each different platform you want to publish your game on and you might need to submit the application multiple times and these fees add up because of this many chinese developers try to purchase a license off the black market for a fee of between 100 000 and 200 000 rmb but the black market is unreliable and carries its own risks and the problems for a chinese developer in the current system just never end really china has been strangling its own independent game industry for years and steam is what has allowed that to change and what paved the way for the rise of china's indie scene an event which is still in its early stages and has already produced a number of great games with plenty more seemingly on the way however on the 21st of february 2021 steam china was officially released and all this might now be about to change to be fair it was a long time coming even though i haven't mentioned it until now people knew about steam china since as early as june 2018 when it was announced that steam would partner with chinese game publisher perfect world to bring an official chinese government approved version of their popular storefront to mainland china and steam china is exactly what you'd expect it to be to create an account you'll have to sign up with your chinese personal identification number all community features are missing and only games with chinese government approved licenses are allowed to be sold meaning instead of the 50 000 plus games on steam global there is currently only 53 you can still access steam global in china for now but many people believe with the official launch of steam china it's just a matter of time before steam global is phased out in the country regardless if history is anything to go by chinese gamers will still find a way to play the games they're interested in they always have from using parents ids to shopping at gray market brick and mortar stores to using vpns chinese gamers find a way and that may well be the main reason steam was allowed to continue operating unofficially all these years in the first place but even if things might turn out okay for chinese gamers i'm not sure if the same can be said about china's indie developers steam is what allowed for the rise of the chinese indie scene it was an invaluable lifeline in a country full of choking regulations fees censorship and constant uncertainty and now that lifeline might finally be about to be removed the great chinese indie gaming revolution is really just starting to get underway and now it might also be coming to a close at the very least it's in serious jeopardy and the already difficult life that many chinese indie devs face is about to become even harder i feel like i should have something uplifting at the end of a video like this you know something to make people feel good about everything after investing so much time listening to me ramble honestly though i have nothing the truth is there's nothing you me or every single other person watching this video can really do about the state of things in china do you remember when there was a controversy about blizzard entertainment actions in regards to the half stone esports player blitzchang after he voiced support for the protesters in hong kong blizzard retaliated to his comments by banning the player from all tournaments for a year and revoking his prize money everyone was angry at blizzard for this it was such a big deal that the united states congress got involved telling blizzard yo what the guys that ain't right let the guy play some half stone and with everyone angry at blizzard and a rather widespread boycott blizzard campaign and the us government getting involved eventually people were able to persuade blizzard to give the guy his money back they still banned him though sorry blitzchang activision blizzard is 5 owned by chinese gaming giant 10 cents just 5 but when people criticize the chinese government even if it's indirect and minor this is what happens and non-chinese companies even the really big ones will tank their stock and their reputation just to keep it that way so yeah it doesn't seem like it really matters what people do the chinese government always gets what it wants that's why the situation is scary it's not actually the censorship itself but so chilling it's the casual way the government is able to just get away with it even with situations that go beyond the borders of its own country however if i were to make some kind of sentimental call to action to close out this truly mammoth video it would be this don't hate on chinese games just because they're chinese and don't hate on chinese developers due to their nationality either life for a chinese indie dev is hard but these people walk the path they do because they love games and if you watch overly long gaming youtube videos like this one i don't know how you can't sympathize with that i feel that the coming decades may well contain much animosity between china and the west and the chinese government has provided enough reasons already to be deeply critical of their actions but there's a difference between a country's government and its people and it's always important to remember that i had a great time playing many of these chinese indie games so maybe you would too and maybe doing so won't always be this easy thank you for watching this video is what can best be described as biting off more than you can chew i promised myself that i would do a plug for my patreon here i actually decided a while back i'd mention the patreon every other video because even though i don't like asking for support on patreon i do like seeing the patreon number go up i like it quite a lot actually but uh the last time i asked for support on patreon was the deus ex video released in november so i'm a little overdue i wanted to make this video for a while now it just seemed like such a great topic for a video and the more i looked into the subject the more interesting things i found out the problem with a video like this is i have no idea how it will perform on youtube in regards to the algorithm i don't know whether people who watch my videos have any interest in chinese indie games i don't know if anyone on youtube does it's not a very common topic and a video like this takes a huge amount of time there was so much game playing and research on top of the already lengthy process of video creation so investing so much time into something that i have no idea if it will be a success just feels incredibly risky and that's why patreon means so much to me it helps me to support myself but it also removes some of the stress that comes with being at the mercy of an incomprehensible algorithm and it allows me to make the videos that i want to make the most if you didn't like this video i guess you probably shouldn't support me on patreon but oh well if you didn't like this video and still made it to the end then that's kind of nice i guess i'll take what i can get never say no to free watch time

Channel: NeverKnowsBest

Views: 196,374

Keywords: Chinese indie games, chinese games, chinese gaming industry, china games, chinese games review, dyson sphere program, dyson sphere program review, dyson sphere review, detention, devotion, genshin impact, candleman, amazing cultivation simulator, icey, unheard, sands of salzaar, chinese parents, gujian 3, bright memory

Id: _VrTZ_UeUxM

Length: 143min 34sec (8614 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/budihartono78]

Overall a great indie documentary about Steam, Chinese govt, indie video game industry in China.

The political bits are playing up the "China govt bad, Chinese people good" cliché though. You know, those gamers' paranoia about Tencent investment, Chinese govt influence, and stuffs. All these even though he showed that it's the Chinese netizens that review-bombed Devotion, leading to the game being pulled from stores.

Also he brought up Blizzard banning blitzchung, lol no shit, try promoting an ongoing sedition in any country and see if both the people and the govt are pleased about it. Trump got deplatformed for supporting the Capitol takeover and a lot of Americans cheered for it.

But still, guy put a lot of effort in trying to understand the scene and Chinese culture a bit, the uneven and frustrating bureaucracy around the censorship IS a problem. Don't let these political controversies prevent you from watching the video if you're interested.