About the image, and this is all personal notes: What a solid summary of Chinese game development. If you told me 20 years ago that China would be producing anything that we could call AAA, I wouldn't have believed you. I'm sure a lot of you will still deny it, but more from a standpoint of raging, furious hatred over the gacha model and sold virtual goods in general.

We all know and have forever heard the Western propaganda: Chinese nationals cannot create, only copy, their talent and skill for copying has been perfected into an art. All your beloved consoles are likely banned in the state. Curfews for the children. Every company being mandated to have a representative or department/board that reports directly to the CCP. All that stuff.

And in those early days, there's World of Warcraft, becoming as big in China as Starcraft is to Korea, if a to us strange and unusual censored form where undead and skeletons have to be cleaned up and made presentable to Chinese sensibilities. And here we are in the present, Blizzard cast aside like an old toy after bending the knee for so many years, not needed anymore.

Even 10 years ago I was still believing all this. Then this international, intercultural Chinese renaissance started springing up when I wasn't paying attention.

When I believed the hype that Kancolle was one day going to be the Touhou Killer, I missed the boat on Azur Lane. When Girls Frontline released, I missed the starting gun, never heard of it until the collab with VA-11 HALL-A.

So when Arknights started pre-release advertising on Twitter, I started getting interested, not knowing all of these titles were Chinese, not knowing the only thing authentically Japanese were the voice actors, not knowing the company was birthed from a split of Girls Frontline devs disagreeing with the direction the game was taking at the time, not knowing the game was even tower defense (if IMHO more like a blend of "real time strategy RPG" mechanics that just happen to mostly distill down to "things are moving toward your blue boxes, don't let them do that").

Now here we are with Mihoyo as king of the hill, boasting the first of a new generation of F2P Breath of the Wild-likes. We have that Wukong game. And it's only going to keep progressing.

And no, not once have I brought up or blamed anything on "woke"

Just make a better product. Because right now, the great and powerful capitalist West is getting out-capitalized by skilled, motivated developers of the East, whether or not the watchful eye of the CCP and the money of giant megacorps like Tencent have anything to do with it.

The ching chong games don't have negros or fatties and that alone makes them better than western games.

And no matter what you think about the gatcha or monetization genshin impact is a well made game.

It runs perfectly on mobile compared to many games that don't even consider optimization. It uses Unity but is so customized that you can't find any "unityisms" that make it obvious what engine is behind it. The writing may not be the deepest but it is wholesome and fun and has a great saturday morning cartoon lighthearted adventure feel.

This seems less DEI hiring (as China usually exports that shit and bans it at home) and more using American resources to train and effectively brain drain talent for their companies.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/arknights/comments/1g57w3a/hypergryph_x_university_of_southern_california/

Was going to be two topics but better to consolidate the discussions into one

The event, paraphrased: Prominent Chinese dev comes to USC, event is attended almost entirely by only Chinese students and the presenters only spoke to them in Chinese. Only the provided slides and merch were English, which I think I've seen before and may be leftovers from game shows they've been recently attending.

The jobs they are recruiting for will be in Shanghai. Not sure if this entails relocation or remote work from a Western US office.

Another poster further down says what would be today will be another recruitment at New York University.

Personal note: Hypergryph has in the past placed a strong importance on education, with there usually being an annual song produced and Arknights marketing and well wishes for students on finals week and graduation. They seem like a bunch of great guys that have been doing well for themselves in the past five years. I hope they get some skilled workers and great insights while recruiting here in the US.

I played a few years of Arknights - was pretty fun! I got tired of having to log in every day, and after being a free player for that long I had becomes so immensely powerful that the game became extremely easy.

Funny thing about it being Chinese developed and having a "Global" release outside of China. They do get JP voice actors for many of the gacha characters (operators, they're called) - and there was a specific drama surrounding one of them who had voiced an operator known as Platinum. She posted on social media how she had visited a Japanese monument commemorating some lost in WWII, and no word of a lie the second she did that, her Chinese masters cut her off 100% persona non grata. She was replaced in a matter of weeks with a new JP VA who redid every single one of Platinum's JP voice lines. [For one, Japan was pretty mean to China during those years and for two, China is extremely sensitive when it comes to image.]

Instances like this, of people working for these companies doing inocuous things that could, for example, reveal that they respect Taiwan's independence or believe Falun Gong is a healthy religion or anything like that, keep these companies from being taken too seriously. There's already many events where the censorious nature of China's massive bureaus of social control where they "shut down" any kind of negative speech about China. These events will certainly damage China's reputation and continue to do so, keeping games like this on the low key until the fateful day that the Chinese take their country back from the communists.