The Chinese studio granted early access on the condition that topics like “feminist propaganda” and “Covid-19” go unmentioned. What followed is the Streisand effect in full force.
“I feel that it only served to bring more attention on Game Science’s culture of sexism,” linktothepabst says. “All they had to do was let the game speak for itself, but it came off, to me, like an own goal, effectively stoking the flames between the people who were using this game as weapon against ‘wokeness in games’ and those who can level-headedly either enjoy the game and criticize GS or just ignore the game altogether.”
It’s the Streisand effect in full force: Try to hide something, and it becomes all the more visible. “Nobody was going to bring up Chinese politics unprompted,” Zhong says, “but the topic was there as soon as they released those guidelines.”
https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/
Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.
I’m sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.
When the story broke, my wife and I discussed it a bit, and I mentioned that I hadn’t even heard of the game before all this.
If it was deliberate marketing, it was really well done.
Could be.
A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn’t think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn’t care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.
Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you’ve never heard of and then someone comes along and says, “We’re going to make it and we’re pulling out all the stops on the graphics.”
If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.
China has a weird approach to misogyny. Women are both empowered and belittled, and it’s all over the media. Anybody who’s read the three body problem trilogy (especially book 3) can attest to this.
The video series tried so hard to downplay that aspect of the books, but it felt like their overall plan was to plaster over & repaint the stains… until the whole thing was rotted through and the mask just slid right off. 😬
Don’t bother with video series.
Read the content to enjoy what value exists, and criticize what issues exist. Reading is not voting or aligning, it’s observing.
I agree, but with a caveat. Pirate things from people who publicly espouse shitty views. Purchasing it is justifying it. JK Rowling has explicitly said she feels more empowered to be awful because people keep buying Harry Potter stuff.
Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.
Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.
Let it die, both financially and culturally.
It Backfired
So much, they have 2 million concurrent players.
Someone here is salty because game is successful. I guess this is related to the IGN article
I don’t think this post said anything about ‘The Game’ backfiring.
It specifically calls out that streamers spoke about exactly what they didn’t want spoken. That’s what the Streisand Effect is.
Congratulations to Game Science for a good game, but it’s business as usual for the C-Suite being completely disconnected to how the social world works.
I would have thought that it was a “CCP interests” boilerplate. That is to say, maybe game science were just following what instructions they needed to by the CCP? It just seems so Chinese government to mention COVID-19 when this game has nothing to do with that.
I think they’re doing this on purpose at this point. Wielding Streisand effect to the fullest of its potential to promote their game.
It backfired at that with me. I had my guard up when it popped up on my Steam queue, so even though I was curious about the game, it was a let’s see that it’s about and then move on for me.
In addition to the ccp stuff, it uses denuvo, so I wouldn’t have bought it anyways, so maybe it didn’t make that much of a difference. Though who knows, maybe I only noticed that because my guard was up; sometimes I forget to check.
Such a weird move to be like “we’ve picked a side in the culture wars, by the way don’t talk politics about us”
There are two genders: male and political.
To people who want the status quo to exist forever (spoiler alert: it won’t), anything other than strict conformity to the status quo is political. But that conformity, itself, is not a political position, because it is ‘normal’.
They pick a side, then they pretend it’s not even a side at all.
This is the part that annoys me. If you want to avoid politics in a space, not “take sides,” (say, as a business owner) I totally get it. However, if you allow A to be said but somebody engaging with that is “too political” or “rocking the boat” you’re very much picking a side - You’re allowing speech A but censoring speech B. Thats the definition of taking a side lmao.
Except they didn’t really pick a side - they got attacked and responded in a way that was bad for PR but honestly kinda predictable. It all got sparked off by them getting a bad review that was mostly positive but penalized the Chinese game heavily inspired by a piece of classic Chinese literature (Journey to the West) for not being diverse enough (aka not featuring many women and no black people), 6/10. What they did since (the rules for streamers seeking a key) has been a (badly chosen) reaction to that.
Unless having a game heavily inspired by a piece of classical literature that doesn’t express the racial and gender diversity of modern LA is itself choosing a side?
There’s a respectful way to do it, and they chose the heavy handed approach, and to act like they have a chip on their shoulder. If they wanted to make that point and head off any politicization, they could have lead with a simple something like “this game is highly committed to its source material, and the creative choices are solely focused on textual authenticity and fun gameplay. We value any feedback about political topics, but we respectfully wish that our game be judged purely on its creative aims”, just as a very rough first draft. There’s no need to take a contentious tone and then demand silence. It’s completely high handed, and practically demands a reaction.
That doesn’t really work either, see pre release coverage for Deliverance: Kingdom Come and aside from a few articles during early crowdfunding about how they were naughty bad people for not having black people in a game set in a few square kilometers of 15th century Bohemia and having a “female character DLC” (the game has a fixed protagonist and the DLC lets you play from the perspective of another character, framed as her telling the MC about how she managed to escape the attack on their village). After the articles about them being racist and sexist for that, there was basically radio silence until it launched and was too big a deal to ignore.
