personable enough, players will pay
out the nose to unlock them. But as
MiHoYo grew and took on more
ambitious games, Cai said that
mission broadened too. MiHoYo’s
flair for character design didn’t have
to appeal only to thirsty dudes. But
despite a rapidly swelling audience,
the studio was still struggling – like
most Chinese developers – to make
games that appealed to an audience
outside of Asia.LEVELLING UP
It’s not news that gaming is a big deal
in China, but it’s important to realise
just how big it really is. Analysts
predict that soon there’ll be more PC
gamers in China than the total
population of the United States, and
PC gaming is just one slice of a larger
gaming pie that is mostly made up of
mobile gamers. But despite being a
$40 billion industry, it’s also one of
the most regulated in the world.senior analyst at Niko Partners, tells
me. For years, Chinese developers
were stuck either making free-to-play
MMOs and pay-to-win mobile games
or working as outsourced
mercenaries for big-budget studios
outside of China. Even Ubisoft’s
Shanghai studio, founded in 1996,
was mostly a helping hand for the
main teams in Montreal and Toronto.
Because all the money was in
mobile games or MMOs, China’s
games industry was a lot more
homogenous than in other countries.
The indie explosion that took the
global games industry by storm
around 2010 was just a gentle breeze
to most Chinese developers. But
that’s changing as the industry
matures and new technologies like
Unity, the consumer-grade game
engine Genshin Impact is built on,
become more ubiquitous. “We’re now
in a position where Chinese game
developers are able to reach [all kinds
of] players,” Ahmad explains. “Not
just on mobile in China or globally, as
it had been for the past few years, but
also now on PC and console to the
same extent as Western developers.”
On PC, that means regularly
seeing new Chinese indie games
dominate Steam’s top-seller charts,
like Dyson Sphere Program and Tale
of Immortal. But it also means
independent Chinese developers, like
MiHoYo, finally have the talent and
tools to compete with the world’s
most popular studios. All MiHoYo
needed was a killer game that could
appeal to as many players on as many
different platforms as possible.CLONE WARS
If there’s a secret sauce to all of
MiHoYo’s games, it’s that eachTOP: Genshin’s story
is typical JRPG
nonsense, and yes
that’s good.
BELOW: You can
almost feel the
seasonal allergies.Before any game can be sold in
China, for example, the government
requires it to undergo a rigorous
censorship process that can take
months to complete – and if your
game is overly violent, sexy, or
features anything from political
commentary to occult magic, it runs a
decent risk of being rejected. The
mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s
Battleground, for example, was
infamously remade into Game For
Peace, a pro-China reskin where
players politely wave goodbye after
you shoot them in the face. That kind
of censorship has created a desperate
need to make games that don’t just
rely on the volatile Chinese market,
but the obstacles are just as daunting.
It’s not just that games need
proper localisation or themes that
appeal to players outside of China,
either. China’s game development
scene is also undergoing rapid
‘industrialisation’ as Daniel Ahmad, aGamenamexxxx
FE ATURE