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.
Enslaved was a great game based off Journey to the West. Unfortunately it sold poorly.
I wonder if Game Science meant avoid politics like “western identity politics” or “critique of the CCP”? Perhaps both?
No idea.
It’s hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.
Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.