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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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A country notorious for faking its math test scores, macroeconomic indicators, astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement, and COVID case numbers, is having unexpectedly great entertainment metrics?

I don’t think we need to do any sort of self-reflective cultural soul-searching here. The reflexive 4chan screech of “BOTS” is both sufficient and necessary in this case.

astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement,

50c Party, not 5c army. Comes from CPC propagandists formerly being paid half a yuan per post.

The concurrent player record could be inflated. It's a new IP by a foreign studio and while covered by culture war circles before its release, it was only after release and the record-breaking numbers that I saw it brought up among normies. A good comparison is Cyberpunk 2077, its peak was 250K just over 1 million, from a somewhat-established IP, the at-the-time preeminent studio, Keanu Reeves, and years of hype.

That said, if it were bad, Steam would show it, and the negative reviews I see are mostly "Game too hard", with a complement of "My computer can't run this." Some have better criticisms, "Invisible walls everywhere," "Buggy AI", "Repetitive", "Poor world design" and "Not enough variety in attacks." So probably a mix: something was done to inflate the numbers, but for a very good though not paradigm-defining game.

How do you fake Steam numbers? You have to pay Valve a cut for every copy sold and they control who can buy, download and play it. This game is mostly popular in China which had already seen massive Steam numbers for games like PUBG. The Chinese friend I made on PUBG is playing this game right now and it's playing numbers crater when China goes to sleep and skyrocket when they wake up, though it's still quite popular in the West and big name streamers are playing it.

The numbers aren't inflated, it's just that the Chinese are hyped for a good Chinese game.

Low regional pricing (currency, Steam regional prices are set by currency,) discounts/e-rebates for store credit, free keys. Valve isn't freewheeling in China, Steam China operates through Perfect World.

But I just saw I was wrong about Cyberpunk's peak, SteamDB has it at 1.05 million. The difference isn't so stark now, and like I said above, the game is clearly very good, and I'm sure I'll play it eventually.

It can also be true that something other than the even very high quality of the game as responsible for its popularity. 2 million concurrent is incredible but I want to know is this a single player experience truly worthy of those numbers, or is it something else. I think we'd be seeing those numbers soaring among western gamers if it were paradigm-defining. It might be, in a month we might see over 3 million, with a million playing in the west. Maybe not, but even if it just playing to market, that's absolutely valid. MiHoYo of Genshin Impact, Honkai, Zenless Zone Zero, play to the western market in having attractive women and no hamfisted politics in their games. China could do nothing but publish AAA knockoffs with fanservice and no politics and devour the market, and they'd be valid to do it, but that wouldn't make the games amazing themselves, and that's what I'm interested in.

I see two ways to do this. One would be to abuse the refund feature and the other would be some combination of aggressive regional pricing and/or handing out coupons for the game in a region you wouldn't make much money in anyway, in order to gain exposure in regions you care about making real sales in.

Now, I don't believe this is what's happening but it's absolutely possible to do. Much more likely is that the game just is very popular in china.

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