Genshin dethrones PUBG Mobile; LoL Wild Rift out in Asia; Moonlight Blade's historic start; Party Animal breaks Steam record; Steam China makes progress — China Gaming News Roundup #8
Genshin makes US$245m on mobile in the first month. Moonlight Blade made US$50m in 7 days. Party Animals saw 113k concurrent players. Records? What records?
Hi team,
It has been a veritable cornucopia of China gaming news during these past several days. To me, the one big through-line underpinning all these stories though is the following:
The power of video games is really SIMULATION.
Many people still sneer at video games as if they were childish pastimes and they find the concept of people paying in games hard to grok. But I think explaining games through the lens of simulation might be helpful for people who still have lingering suspicion.
After all, John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, and the likes are in video games to do simulation. These tech wizzes, combined with the likes of Romeo, Miyamoto, and Kojima, have created the video game industry. I know I'm preaching to the choir here. But because these days simulation tech is getting so ungodly good and people are so comfortable dwelling in a simulated world, it bears repeating.
Anyway, for this issue of roundup, I want to try something new. Let's start with a bullet-point summary and we can then quickly move onto my short analyses over each segment.
Genshin Impact
League of Legends: Wild Rift
After much debate, Riot will give Wild Rift an esports scene
Moonlight Blade
It has set a new record for a mobile game release in China
Party Animals
Party Animals breaks concurrent player number on Steam for a Chinese game
Sociability + wonky physics = instant appeal?
Steam China
Steam China will no longer be the safe haven for games unlicensed in China
Shanghai wants to brand Steam China as an accomplishment of the Free Trade Zone
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact pulled in US$245 million in the first month.
Again, if Sensor Tower's estimates are anything to go by, Genshin Impact is hitting home run after home run, and it is likely hoovering up a whole lot more cash than US$245m given that amount only accounts for mobile sales and it excludes sales on third-party Android app stores. Genshin has a huge following on both console and PC. A quick check on Twitch will confirm that.
However, there are now two strands of concerns arising around Genshin: one over its gacha mechanic and the other over its censorship in chat.
For the emerging concerns over the game's gacha mechanic, feel free to check out these articles by the WSJ and The Straits Times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/10/06/genshin-impact-gambling/
As far as the earlier outrage against Genshin's censorship in chat, you can check out my article here.
League of Legends: Wild Rift
Wild Rift is out.
How I play it: I use a Japan-based iOS account to download the game and, to play it, I have a VPN switched on.
In short, the game is great. It is an excellent gateway drug to acquaint gamers with the larger League of Legends esports ecosystem. That said, the game doesn't play as smoothly as Honor of Kings does but that is because Wild Rift is more sophisticated than is Honor of Kings. Specifically, the aiming is tougher but allows for more precision. You also can't just purchase items on the fly like you would in other standard mobile MOBAs.
For all the details about the Asia release of the game, check out my article here.
There’s one interesting storyline that didn’t make it into this story: it allegedly took Riot a while to decide whether Wild Rift should have an esports scene. For what I've heard from an ex-Tencent guy, this remained a debate up until early this year. It doesn't take a genius to understand why that constituted a concern, though. After all, Riot was worried that the less sophisticated Wild Rift esports scene may wind up cannibalizing the already very established League of Legends esports scene. That said, it makes sense to charge ahead with Wild Rift esports in my humble opinion. After all, Wild Rift may represent the future if things go extraordinarily well on mobile. I hope PC still reigns supreme for selfish reasons but it really can go either way like this upcoming US election.
Moonlight Blade:
Although Genshin and Wild Rift were the biggest headlines, the story which has pulled in the most traffic for me these two weeks is actually this one on Moonlight Blade.
MMOs feel like old news, especially the wuxia ones in China. Perhaps my personal sense of fatigue with these games stems from this genre’s lack of exciting innovation. That said, it's a huge market, and these MMO game launches keep setting records.
I have to confess that I've never gotten into an MMO. But I hope they do well. MMOs in China come with far heavier expectations than do MMOs in the West. Chinese MMOs are, in many ways, the AAA games in China. And this is due to historical reasons. Back in the days when people couldn't quite afford premium games, free-to-play MMOs were all they would play in internet cafes or PC bangs. As such, the top engineers were all recruited to create MMOs, especially after WoW became a cultural phenomenon.
So that explains why MMOs in China, even in today's age of mobile gaming, are highly anticipated and keep hauling in an obscene amount of revenue at launch. Today if you are Tencent or NetEase, you kinda have to have your flagship MMOs and gamers low-key expect them to be wuxia MMOs. And in some ways, people still use MMOs to evaluate how good a given Chinese gaming company is in comparison with their peers.
Party Animals
Party Animals saw more than 113,000 players logged on simultaneously on its fourth free trial day, shattering the previous concurrent player record held by a Chinese game on Steam.
I'll harp on the point about games are effectively simulation for the one last time here.
Having more than 113,000 players logged on simultaneously on its fourth free trial day is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, it may be a flash in the pan. Sure, it may stem largely from a concerted marketing push with the company hiring an army of streamers to build hype and people were foolish enough to have fallen for it. But the fact of the matter is people did get excited about this game. More importantly, Human: Fall Flat has shown that these games have staying power if done right. (Done wrong, though, simulation/party games are highly replaceable. Party Animals clones are already springing up on mobile.)
In any event, my thesis is that the emergence of these games is not a coincidence. Now making a multiplayer party game is easier than ever and people feel more comfortable than ever to socialize in games. So a party game with funky physics, effectively a simulated party room, can have broad appeal.
Steam China
Last but not least, we are getting some updates about Steam China — it will require games will have to have government approvals before they can be sold on the platform.
That said, it is already widely anticipated that Steam China would implement a license check. Now the remaining question is whether it will replace the international version of Steam in China when and if it comes out. A great majority of games on Steam currently don't have to be approved by the Chinese government but it is considered more a loophole in regulation than anything else. As such, once Steam China is ready to launch, Steam may be in danger of being blocked in China. Frankly, it is a miracle that Steam has survived this long, and Steam has an absolutely humongous following in China.
All in all, it is worth noting that we still don't have any official information about Steam China. All the information available thus far comes from web engineers such as Pavel Djundik who routinely spot new features being added to Steam/Steam China.
(I'm posting this tweet here because it actually marks a mistake of mine. The story originally went out stating that Sony had recently added a new section to its TOS in Hong Kong expressly stating that any activities or remarks which could threaten Chinese national security would be held accountable. But turned out, that was fake news as the section was there from ages ago. I was personally misled by a few viral tweets and some usually reliable sources.)
Back to Steam China, from what I heard from people at Perfect World — Valve's partner in China, Steam China started actually as a bit of a vanity project for the Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. The city of Shanghai essentially jumped the gun and unveiled the project two years ago. But the truth was that although Shanghai wanted to market its FTZ as highly free and liberal for games, the central government was going the entirely opposite direction at the time as it tightened its grip on games. The central government was in the midst of a reshuffle delegating different game-regulating powers to different organs. As such, the Steam China project has been progressing at such a snail's pace because various levels of politics and power struggle were in the way.