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.