How a new wave of Chinese talent

is breaking boundaries – and cracking

the western triple-A market

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When Genshin Impact launched last September, no one really expected it would be a billion-dollar hit. At least, not outside its home territory.?

Genshin’s developer, MiHoYo, is based in Shanghai – and while China is the world’s largest market for videogames, with an estimated 640 million players, games developed in the country rarely travel beyond its borders. Often they aren’t even intended to.?

Take, for example, Honor Of Kings. Despite being one of the highest grossing games of all time, it’s entirely likely you’ll have never heard of it, since the MOBA released exclusively for China. It also fits the usual Chinese game paradigm: mobile-only, free-to play, bankrolled by gaming giant Tencent and, arguably, rather lacking on the originality front. When a localised version came to the west as Arena Of Valor, the heroes of Chinese myth replaced with generic fantasy characters, it only served to highlight the game’s roots as a League Of Legends knock-off (so much so that it reportedly led to conflict between Tencent-owned Riot Games and its parent company).?

By comparison, two-thirds of Genshin Impact’s first-month revenues on mobile came from territories outside China, according to Sensor Tower figures. In the US alone it earned $45 million over that period, smashing the record for the biggest launch of a mobile RPG. It’s worth noting that Genshin Impact is a crossplatform title, its gorgeous open world and elementally charged realtime combat equally at home on PC or PlayStation.?

Right now, Genshin Impact is the anomaly to Honor Of Kings’ norm. But a new wave of Chinese developers is looking to further disrupt the status quo. Games in development range from one-man projects such as Bright Memory: Infinite to Black Myth: Wukong, an action RPG from ex-Tencent developers that’s being billed as China’s first premium triple-A game. Could these upstarts really break through the Great Wall and lead the Chinese game industry into a new frontier？

MOBILE SUITED China’s preference for mobile doesn’t mean its playerbase has been limiting itself to certain types of games. Indeed, with premium franchises getting the touchscreen treatment, from Call Of Duty: Mobile to the forthcoming Diablo Immortal, as well as the China-exclusive Devil May Cry: Peak Of Combat, there is a clear demand for triple-A quality on mobile. “There used to be a very clear separation of what platform you were developing for, but in the future that won’t be the case any more,” Yang says. “The border is getting blurry – it’s getting blurry from development teams and from gamers, so I can picture the platform mattering less. But the thing that will matter more is the quality.”

These releases break the rules of Chinese development in a number of ways, beginning with the simple fact that many are coming to console. With the Xbox Series machines set to reach China in June, the country’s console market is opening up, but this represents a huge shift from the traditional dominance of mobile and PC. This goes back to the console ban implemented in 2000, over concerns about videogame addiction.

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Not that it was impossible to play console games in the region. Imported products remained openly available on the grey market, meaning the influences of games from outside China weren’t entirely lost on developers – at least, those who could afford them – growing up in this period. This included FYQD Personal Studio’s Zeng Xiancheng, whose love for western FPS games inspired his work on Bright Memory: Infinite. “When I was 12 years old, I played Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and it made me feel the shock of immersive games for the first time in my life,” he says.

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The ban also didn’t prevent China based studios from working on console games, with tech hubs such as Shanghai home to foreign-owned studios. Indeed, Next Studios creative director Clark Yang – now working on Synced: Off Planet – began his career at Ubisoft Shanghai in 2004 before moving to Europe, then settling in Montréal, bouncing between Ubisoft and Warner Bros. “Ubisoft is just one of the western studios with presences in China – EA and Activision have offices in Shanghai, 2K in Chengdu – but their primary roles have been as outsourcing studios for games released overseas,” he tells us. “The dev population wasn’t that big compared to Canada or the US, but there have always been developers. They’re all using the same toolkit, for sure.”

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When it comes to releases targeted closer to home, though, the knock-on effects of the console ban run deeper than might be immediately obvious. “The console ban was fairly significant in terms of shifting the way Chinese game developers created games for the [domestic] market,” explains Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, which has specialised in researching and analysing the videogame market in Asia since 2002. “When?Niko first started doing research on the market, what we found out was 50 per cent of game time from Chinese gamers was actually on standalone console or PC games. But they were all pirated!”

Faced with the prospect of losing the majority of its revenue from consumers unwilling to pay for fullpriced games, Chinese developers adopted the free-to-play model that has dominated ever since. Rather than a one-and-done experience, they needed products that could foster long-term engagement and encourage microtransactions – a major factor in the rise of MMORPGs in the region.

Despite the lifting of the ban in 2015, consoles still account for only one per cent of the market, so it’s unsurprising that the Chinese industry has been largely reluctant to shift from its trajectory. The story of Black Myth: Wukong began back in 2011, when the studio’s founders were working at Tencent on Journey To The West-inspired free-to-play MMO Asura. While they saw the potential to adapt this material into a triple-A product, their pitch was rejected. “Tencent at the time said,‘No one’s going to buy that – there’s no market for that in China’. Which was true at the time,” Ahmad recalls. “When consoles came back into the market, there were still all these regulatory issues with games having to be approved officially. There’s also a pricing issue, in terms of choosing between $300 for a console when they can play free-to-play on mobile.

Free-to-play – and the accompanying emphasis on ‘pay to win’ design – has proved a tough habit for the Chinese game industry to kick. While it might look just about as polished as a premium Nintendo release, Genshin Impact is also a free-to-play title that’s making millions daily by enticing players to open their wallets in the hopes of unlocking new characters through the game’s gacha system. While this aspect came under heavy scrutiny from western critics when the game first launched, it is possible to earn in-game currency in Genshin Impact simply by playing it – and, more to the point, heavily touted monetisation practices are hardly endemic to China. Just look at FIFA’s Ultimate Team or Epic’s efforts to facilitate impulse buys in Fortnite.

Nonetheless, this is a perception that some Chinese developers are eager to put to bed – and not just the ones making standalone single player games. 24 Entertainment is bucking the global trend for free-to-play battle royale games with Naraka: Bladepoint. Audience reactions to the game’s premium model have subverted stereotypes, we’re told, with western players assuming the title would be free-to-play while Chinese players have been more approving. “China’s gaming market has been developing so rapidly, which we think will lead to the community’s eventual acceptance of premium games and exclusion of pay to-win elements,” Raylan Kwan, the studio’s marketing manager, says.

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Meanwhile, having sold all its games to date at budget prices, Next is making the move to free-to-play with its next release, dystopian thirdperson shooter Synced: Off Planet. It’s a model intended to help support the studio’s post-release update plans – and Yang is?adamant the game will never be pay-to-win. “It’s more like we’re building a platform,” he says. “We’re building a new universe.”

CLONING IS DEEPLY INGRAINED IN CHINA’S COMPLICATED HISTORY WITH VIDEOGAMES

Another issue the Chinese game industry has faced is its reputation for making brazen imitations. Cloning is deeply ingrained in China’s complicated history with videogames, going as far back as the numerous bootleg Famicoms sold in the country, and blatant copyright infringements are still rampant, from blatant rip-offs of Nintendo properties to Overwatch, and even indie hits such as Fall Guys and Among Us. Even Zeng admits to having used stolen, unlicensed assets in the first release of Bright Memory, although these have since been replaced.

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It was easy to dismiss Genshin Impact, with its open world and anime visuals, as a shameless Breath Of The Wild clone (when it was announced for PS4 at ChinaJoy, one attendee infamously smashed his PS4 on the show floor in protest). At first glance, there’s not much to separate Synced’s gritty aesthetic and third person shooting from the likes of The Division. For all the praise heaped on its visuals, you might also argue that Black Myth: Wukong is just another developer climbing on the crowded Souls-like bandwagon. Not that western developers are innocent of this, of course.

GREYMATTERS Even after the end of the console ban, Chinese consumers still opt for importing via the grey market simply because there’s very little incentive to invest in official consoles that not only arrive late but come with too many restrictions: Xbox One is region locked with no access to Game Pass, for example. Even as newgen consoles finally launch in China, the lack of confidence in these official platforms may explain why developers such as Game Science, 24 Entertainment and Next Studios are circumventing potential complications by targeting Steam first.

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Besides, on closer inspection, Synced does offer something different. The cyborg zombies you encounter, Nanos, can be hacked to fight alongside you, bringing a touch of twisted Pikmin to its horde survival elements that, Yang says, “makes it unique from any other game”. Meanwhile, Naraka: Bladepoint subverts the battle royale template by ditching the guns in favour of sword-based combat and grappling traversal in a Buddhist-inspired fantasy world. Its melee swordplay is not inspired by any recent games, we’re told, but rather a popular China-exclusive PC action game from 2002 called Meteor Blade. “Back then, Meteor Blade captured the imagination because there were too few multiplayer melee combat games on the market,” Kwan says. “Our producer, Ray Kuan, was also the producer of Meteor Blade. Like us, he recognises this need among players is actually still there, even a decade on! We are really very confident that Naraka : Blade point will finally deliver this experience , not just for? China , but for the whole world .”

Design and business practices aside, though, there’s a more immediate reason this new class of Chinese games have attracted more attention in the west: they all look fantastic.

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To understand the way Chinese-made games have traditionally looked,we have to go back once again to the early 2000s. PC ownership was low, and the most affordable option for

players was Internet cafés, limiting the quality of games developers would be able to produce. They usually were developed for the lowest common denominator in terms of PC ???hardware :specs, so they could run regardless of whether the Internet café PCs were high-end or low-end," Ahmad says.

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That's all changing, thanks in part to tools such as Unity (which powers both Genshin Impact's open world and Naraka: Bladepoint, the first game to incorporate DLSS on the engine) and especially Unreal. The latter has proved a game changer, putting Chinese developers on a more level playing field with the rest of the world.

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While Game Science was founded in 2014, its formative years were spent developing two free-to-play multiplayer mobile titles, and it wasn't until 2017 that its Hangzhou studio was established to focus on premium titles. The remarkable gameplay demo for Black Myth was based on more than two years' development while the team learned Unreal Engine 4.

Zeng, who made his first FPS - Call Of Duty homage War Storm - while he was still at school, first discovered the Unreal Development Kit in 2011. He's open about the shortcuts he's been able to take to achieve Bright Memory: Infinite's visual fidelity as a solo developer, including store-bought assets and middleware such as Blueprints visual scripting, Quixel Megascans, and Character Creator." I personally do not define Bright Memory as a triple-A level game

- of course, the graphical quality has turned out well,” he says, rather humbly." I believe if any developer used the software and resources I have appropriately, and they have a unique design concept for their game, it is not difficult to achieve visuals like that of Bright Memory: Infinite.”

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And right at the other end of the spectrum to 'Zeng's solo efforts, the old guard is finally throwing its weight behind premium console-ready games. Next Studios is actually an internal division of Tencent, founded in 2017 with the remit to create 'new experiences and technology'(its name is a contraction of that phrase)- original games that go beyond the corporation's mobile wheelhouse. It's perhaps a sign of a broader shift in the corporation's stance, from the partnership it struck with Nintendo, leading to Switch's official release in China in 2019, to investing a five percent stake in Game Science.(The irony of the studio being founded by former employees whose pitch Tencent rejected hasn't been lost on observers.)"[Tencent] understands there's this growing trend of high-end games and the console market is coming back,” Ahmad says. "They are jumping on this bandwagon when ten or 15 years ago they didn't really see a market for it.”

There are some good reasons for China-based developers, big and small, to be chasing audiences outside of their borders. The average Chinese player today has more disposable income and is happier to pay for full-priced games than at the start of the millennium, but

the industry’s growth is still affected by the unpredictable policy shifts occasionally made by the Chinese government, such as an approvals freeze occurring in 2018 and 2019 that led to

no new game releases in the country.

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OUTSOURCE ?MAJEURE

How much of a part do western studios operating in China play in shaping the Chinese game industry? Since being founded in 2008, Ubisoft Chengdu has been primarily a support studio, working on games such as Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. However, the studio has taken a step onto the international stage with Immortals Fenyx Rising, where it led on the development of the game’s Ancient China themed DLC. It’s also the developer of the Rabbids party game made exclusively for the Chinese version of Switch. Not the most glamorous title, perhaps, but a fully self-developed game for a console is a sign that Chengdu, and studios like it, may have a bigger role to play in the future.

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The introduction of the state[1]sanctioned Steam China earlier this year might look like a step forward, but the meagre library of games with which the platform launched tells a rather different story – and highlights the hoops that developers targeting the domestic market have to jump through. “The approval process is so cumbersome and so long in China that some Chinese developers now release their games in the US first, even if it was designed initially for the Chinese market,” Ahmad says.

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The international incarnation of Steam already had a major presence in the country, despite being essentially a grey market accessible via the country’s firewall – Niko estimates 50 million of Steam’s registered users are based in China, with simplified Chinese the platform’s most popular language. It’s unclear whether it will become inaccessible in future, but for now it remains a vital outlet for games that don’t get officially approved.

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It’s understandable, then, that developers would increasingly prioritise global reach for their games. Especially given the games intended for domestic audiences, and only available in simplified Chinese, which have become surprise international bestsellers on Steam. This is how the otherwise[1]obscure life management sim Chinese Parents found itself receiving an English localisation and even a Switch port. “Chinese developers are coming to an understanding that there’s this huge opportunity where if you create a game for the China market, people are still going to want to play it in the west,” Ahmad says. “That is why we’re seeing more games that are starting to really focus on marketing in both China and the west at the same time.”

So perhaps it’s not quite a case of separating the gaming world into China and everywhere else. 24 Entertainment has pitched Naraka: Bladepoint as “eastern influences meet western style”, and while the studio is headquartered in Hangzhou, development spans multiple territories, with the team comprising veterans from western triple-A as well as mobile. “We have been targeting a global audience from day one of Naraka: Bladepoint’s development,” Kwan says. “So it just made sense to recruit developers from all over the world.” It’s been a learning experience, he says, highlighting “gaps that exist in some areas”, technical and artistic. “In order to achieve a similar level of results, we often have to re-construct the processes that western colleagues have implemented.”

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Having worked on both sides of the supposed east-west divide, Yang thinks the differences are overstated. “Even when console game development wasn’t the same in China back then, there have still always been developers here, not really learning from the western studios but learning from the industry itself,” he says. It’s a similar story when it comes to the players, he argues. “Despite what you might believe, I don’t think gamers are too different. From our Reddit and Discord, we’ve been discussing Synced with them all the time, and the funny thing is, everyone speaks a different language but we all have the same understanding, because we are all gamers.”

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As games developed in China start to make a bigger impact beyond the country’s borders, there’s an opportunity for that shared understanding to grow more broadly. Developers are more confidently injecting their local cultural identity into games aimed at a global audience, something you can see in Genshin Impact’s Chinese-inspired characters and locations, the sword-based martial arts of Naraka: Bladepoint, and SunWukong’s starring role in Black Myth. “Eastern gamers have learnt much of western culture through playing games,” Kwan muses. “It’s nice to have this in reverse, I guess.”