Gamers With Attitude

This season finale looks back at the arc of Chinese games from "copycat" to "creator." We start in the 2000s, when piracy set a baseline where almost nobody paid for software — the original sin the industry spent two decades repaying. We move through the 2010s mobile boom that funded every later prestige title but trained publishers to chase retention over craft. And we arrive at the 2020s global moment, when Genshin Impact and Black Myth Wukong earned a seat at the table — even as a quiet local anxiety about deserving it refused to lift. Threaded through it all are the people who stayed when leaving looked rational, and the ones who left anyway. We leave three conflicts open and end on the line that bridges into Season 3. This is a tribute without a tidy bow — a record of the believers who outlasted the doubt, and the stubbornness that slowly turned a copycat reputation into a creator's seat at the table.

Shownotes (Full)


**The one line:** A season-finale reckoning with the ugly years of Chinese games — from the piracy baseline of the 2000s to the global moment of the 2020s — and a tribute to the people who stayed.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. The 2000s piracy economy raised a generation that couldn't imagine paying for software, creating an "original sin" the industry spent two decades repaying — (as discussed in episode)
2. The 2010s mobile boom funded every later prestige title but trained publishers to prize retention metrics above craft — (as discussed in episode)
3. The 2020s global successes (Genshin Impact, Black Myth Wukong) earned a seat at the table while leaving a local anxiety about deserving it unresolved — (public reporting)


**Three takeaways:**


* Copycat versus creator is a timeline problem, not a talent problem; creation needs an economy that can afford the risk.
* Global applause is real but conditional and reversible; it doesn't settle the old inferiority.
* Those who believed it could get better are still here — that's the bridge into Season 3.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

Black Myth Wukong's 2024 launch was more than a sales story. It was the moment Chinese games stopped being a regional category and became a global conversation. We look at why the day-one worldwide release mattered, why a 2.4 million concurrent Steam peak (third-party estimate) made the game an "event" the West attended rather than a studio it chose to follow, and how a single title got pinned as the representative of an entire industry, overshadowing peers like HoYoverse's Genshin Impact and Pocketpair's Palworld. The episode refuses tidy conclusions: being globally seen is a new kind of exposure, not a finish line, and the pride of arrival sits honestly next to the discomfort of being explained back to us. We also sit with the complicated relief of "finally," and with the heavy, unrequested role of cultural spokesperson that a small studio never applied for. The West looked back this year, and what it brought with that gaze is messier than any sales chart can capture.

Shownotes (Full)


**The one line:** Black Myth Wukong made Chinese games globally "seen" in 2024, and the gaze that came back carried both hard-won pride and an old Western frame we have not yet escaped.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. The launch's global day-one sync put Chinese and Western players in the same world at the same hour for the first time at this scale, turning visibility into real parity rather than a delayed, edited afterthought. — (as discussed in episode)
2. A Steam peak of 2.4M+ concurrent (third-party estimate) and widespread, unusually long Western reviews (public reporting) cemented Black Myth as the single "Chinese game," flattening a diverse industry that also includes HoYoverse's Genshin Impact and Pocketpair's Palworld, the latter later sued by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company (public statement). — (third-party estimate)
3. Even admiring Western reviews often framed the game as a pleasant surprise from a "non-Western" studio, showing that genuine amazement and an outdated lens happily coexisted inside the same paragraph. — (public reporting)


**Three takeaways:**


* A representative is not a burden when you chose them; it becomes one when an outside audience assigns the role and expects a whole industry to speak through a single title.
* "Finally" names a real achievement, but it quietly hands the timing to the people who were late to their own appreciation, and the relief we feel proves we were told the clock was theirs.
* Global visibility is a new kind of exposure with new weight, not a finish line you cross and then relax; holding the pride and the discomfort together is the job now.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

On July 29, 2026, 505 Games and Xia Siyuan's new Chengdu studio, **Indolphinity (成都递归海豚)**, announced a sequel to *Wuchang: Fallen Feathers* (《明末：渊虚之羽》), with Digital Bros committing an initial **€21.5M (≈ RMB 165M)**. On the surface it's a redemption arc: the director who was pushed out of Leenzee earlier in 2026 returns to lead the creative development of the Wuchang sequel, funded and published by 505.

In this episode Shawn and Serevnt read past the feel-good headline. They walk the full arc — the July 2025 launch disaster (PC optimization, regional-pricing friction in the China market, a pre-order-bonus fiasco, a 21%-positive Steam open that later recovered above 80%), the 2026 internal implosion (Xia's reported forced exit, the team's disbanding, his tiny RMB-50,000 new company), Digital Bros' April 2026 acquisition of 100% of the IP for ~€4M, and the July reversal.

The attitude lands on one distinction: when the announcement says "the creative rights remain with the original author, retained in China," that means **creative control** — a job — not **IP ownership**, which sits 100% with Digital Bros, with revenue flowing through 505. The most accomplished Chinese soulslike director comes back to lead the sequel, and the structure he returns to looks an awful lot like a "senior hired hand" arrangement. We name the arrangement instead of letting the comeback story name it for us — and ask what Chinese game makers still need in order to own their own games.

China's games didn't conquer the world by accident. The old model, reskin and buy-volume, leaked because rented players don't retain and copycat mechanics age badly. What replaced it was the Genshin model: build a real product, localize it properly, and sync the global launch on day one across PC, mobile, and console. miHoYo, under its global brand HoYoverse, and Game Science, with Black Myth: Wukong, proved a Chinese studio could own the worldwide chart and ship a premium single-player blockbuster, respectively. But the road has tolls. Localization faceplants still turn launches into memes overnight. Payment and compliance friction, from the thirty percent platform cut to GDPR and version approvals, stalls launches players never see. Cultural discount erodes meaning across borders, and Western media too often meets a Chinese game with a derivative frame. We leave three fights, sync versus stagger, dilute versus specific, buy-volume versus product, deliberately unresolved. The voyage is underway, and its destination is still being negotiated.

The one line:** The Chinese games industry didn't just learn to export — it learned to arrive as a brand, and the hard part now is everything the charts don't show.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. The Genshin day-one global sync, not reskin-and-buy-volume, is what reset the export model, and Game Science proved the same lesson at AAA scale with Black Myth: Wukong selling over twenty million copies. — (public reporting)
  
2. The real barriers to going global are operational, not creative: localization faceplants, payment and compliance friction (platform cuts, GDPR, version approvals), and cultural discount. — (third-party estimate)
  
3. The industry's emotional payoff is being seen as a brand, not a factory, but that visibility brings Western media bias and three unresolved strategic collisions. — (public reporting)
  


**Three takeaways:**


* The old excuse that a Chinese game can't land globally is dead; what replaced it is harder, and more interesting.
* Success came as two proofs: miHoYo's live-service global sync (Genshin Impact) and Game Science's premium single-player blockbuster (Black Myth: Wukong).
* Three collisions stay open on purpose: global sync versus China-only edition, cultural export versus cultural discount, and buy-volume export versus product export.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

China's games industry runs on a marketing department it never hired. On this episode, we look at why a single piece of fan art can out-perform a seven-figure ad campaign, and why that's normal in China but a footnote in the West. We cover the Genshin launch where community UGC absorbed a review-bombing the press releases couldn't; the official accounts that reply to their own memes in character; the doujin conventions where tens of thousands of people trade in someone else's intellectual property; and the obscure game systems that only came alive because modders refused to let them die. We use Black Myth: Wukong's years-long Bilibili hype as the clearest proof. And we leave three tensions deliberately unresolved: when fan creation empowers versus when it becomes a copyright minefield, when the studio should jump in versus stay wild, and how free co-creation becomes commercial conversion. The takeaway is uncomfortable: the player was never just the audience.

The one line:** In China, fan-created content is not a byproduct of games — it is the invisible marketing and emotional infrastructure that holds many titles up.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. In China, UGC functions as distribution and discovery infrastructure, not a niche hobby — the China Game Publishers Association (CNG) pegs the national player base at over 600 million (CNG caliber), a scale that turns fan output from a trickle into weather.
2. Fan creation has directly carried games through reputational and commercial moments — Genshin Impact's launch faced a coordinated review-bombing (public reporting), yet community lore videos and fan art became the game's de facto PR; Black Myth: Wukong sold over 10 million copies in its first three days (public statement) after a multi-year Bilibili fan-content cycle.
3. The open tensions are real and unresolved across platforms — miHoYo and HoYoverse official accounts lean into memes (public reporting), while NetEase runs a paid Minecraft 组件 add-on marketplace and Hypergryph's Arknights built a music doujin scene (public reporting), each solving "free versus commercial" a different, incomplete way.


**Three takeaways:**


* Players understand this game better than the marketing team; treat them as co-authors, not an audience to be sold to.
* The doujin convention is the industry's real emotional R&D — cheaper and more honest than any survey a studio commissions.
* Never monetize the meme; the fastest way to kill user-generated momentum is to put a price tag and a logo on it.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

For decades the trailer was the spearhead of every game launch: a cinematic reveal, an orchestral swell, a slow-motion hero shot. Not anymore — at least not in China, where the trailer has quietly become a formality. In this episode we trace how Douyin and short-video clips (切片) replaced the traditional reveal as the country's dominant game-publishing engine. We explain why a single fifteen-second gameplay slice can outsell a studio's entire marketing budget, how up-hosts came to outrank official websites in player trust, and why the West's trailer-plus-review pipeline is a local custom rather than a law of nature. We also confront the uncomfortable mechanics underneath the hype: recommendation algorithms that maximize reach over truth, paid volume masquerading as organic love, and publishers who have traded control for a traffic frenzy they cannot switch off. Three collisions are left open on purpose, because the industry hasn't solved them either. From Palworld's clip-driven explosion to the up-hosts now seeded with early builds, the new launch economy runs on strangers, not studios.

**The one line:** In China, the fifteen-second Douyin clip — not the cinematic trailer — has become the real launch event for games, and the West is about to follow.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. A single clip can outsell the entire official campaign — Pocketpair's Palworld spread through short looping clips on Douyin, Bilibili and TikTok and reached over two million concurrent Steam players within days (public reporting).
2. The up-host now outranks the official site — Chinese players treat a creator's raw gameplay clip as evidence and the publisher's trailer as marketing, so studios seed up-hosts with early builds to buy back the trust they lost (as discussed in episode).
3. The win arrives with three unresolved collisions — clips sell but flatten the narrative, the algorithm reaches everyone but earns no trust, and publishers gain traffic while losing control (as discussed in episode).


**Three takeaways:**


* The clip that sold you the game is a ten-second audition, not the game — watch the rest before you trust it.
* "Organic" virality is often paid volume (投放); assume the love you see might be a line item.
* The Western trailer-plus-review model is a local custom, not a law of nature — the clip is already crossing the border.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

Fourteen years of World of Warcraft in China ended over a contract most players never read — an insider who was inside the machine tells the story, transcribed faithfully from the 2022 Chinese original.

In November 2022, Blizzard announced it would not renew its NetEase publishing deal, setting up a January 23, 2023 shutdown of every Blizzard game in China. In this CLONE-transcribed episode, Shawn sits down with 脑哥 (Naoge) — a fourteen-year veteran of the NetEase–Blizzard joint venture who joined at the 2009 handover from The9 — to reconstruct the economics and the human story behind the split, following the original 2022 Chinese conversation turn-by-turn. The talk moves from the 2009 transition (The9's arrogance, the "eternal TBC" Wrath of the Lich King delay, the 贾君鹏回家吃饭 meme), through the "pastoral era" of monthly cards and player-run ops (William Ding mistaken for a refund-seeking player at his own front desk; Yao Ming calling customer service at 3 a.m.), into the censorship battles forced by the publishing administration, the Starcraft II Golden League, and NetEase's operational legacy. It then walks the real-time 2022 "who takes over?" board (Bilibili, Kongzhong, Perfect World, The9, Oriental Pearl, Microsoft China), the fate of the ops teams, and closes on the bigger shift: the age of importing foreign games was ending, and Chinese games were already shipping overseas. Transcribed as faithfully as possible from the Chinese original — not re-voiced.

In early 2024, Pocketpair's Palworld became a global phenomenon, topping two million concurrent Steam players within days of its January 19 launch, while drawing immediate comparisons to Pokémon for its creature designs and ball-based capture mechanic. The rights holders responded in stages: a public investigation statement from The Pokémon Company in late January, then a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company in the Tokyo District Court on September 18, 2024, seeking an injunction and roughly ten million yen in damages. The case centers on patents for specific game mechanics, not on the creature art itself. For Chinese developers, the saga reopened a long debate about 借鉴, the normalized practice of borrowing from hits, and the international "copycat" stigma. We trace the split reactions at home, the irony of Palworld's own CEO defending Chinese clones, and the counter-narrative offered by Black Myth Wukong, a globally successful original built on a public-domain classic.

The one line:** Palworld forced China's game industry to confront the 借鉴 habit in public, at the exact moment its own global ambitions made that habit expensive.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. Palworld's familiarity was real, but the legal fight is about mechanics, not the creature art. Pocketpair launched Palworld on January 19, 2024, selling eight million copies in roughly a week and peaking above two million concurrent Steam players [Source: SteamDB and Pocketpair sales disclosures]. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court on September 18, 2024, seeking an injunction and about ten million yen in damages [Source: Nintendo Co., Ltd. press release, September 19, 2024]. The three cited patents cover capture-related systems, such as throwing items to interact with characters and displaying catch probability during capture, not the creature likenesses players noticed most [Source: Pocketpair disclosure, November 2024].
  
2. The Chinese developer community is split because 借鉴 is simultaneously normalized at home and stigmatized abroad. Inside China, borrowing from overseas hits has long been an accepted commercial path, and the word 借鉴 literally means to borrow as a reference and reflect on it, a respectable concept in local creative culture [Source: 21st Century Business Herald, September 2024]. Yet younger studios building global titles resent the "copycat" label, a double standard they note is rarely applied to Western or Japanese games that borrow just as openly [Source: industry commentary, The Paper, January 2024]. Palworld's global, familiar-looking launch reopened that wound rather than healed it.
  
3. As Chinese games go global, the IP equation is flipping from copying to protecting. The Pokémon Company won a Chinese court ruling against the unauthorized game Pocket Monster: Remake, awarded around 107 million yuan, a signal that domestic courts now punish blatant infringement [Source: 21st Century Business Herald, September 2024]. In the same year, Black Myth Wukong, released August 2024, peaked above 2.4 million concurrent Steam players with roughly 30 percent from outside China, proving an original title rooted in the public-domain novel Journey to the West can compete at the very top tier [Source: SteamDB / Niko Partners analysis].
  


**Three takeaways:**


* Borrowing is universal in games, but the global market increasingly rewards original identity over recognizable similarity, and the legal cost of crossing the line keeps rising.
* The Palworld case is a patent dispute about systems and methods, still live and unresolved, and we take no stance on whether infringement occurred.
* China's "copycat" reputation fades one genuinely original global hit at a time, with Black Myth Wukong as the current proof and the 借鉴 debate as the industry's unfinished homework.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.

This flagship current-events episode dissects the 2026 gaming-GPU "generational gap": no new consumer GPU architecture ships this year, prices are climbing across the board, and supply is tightening — but this is a story of industry economics, not geopolitics. From a Chinese game-practitioner's view for overseas listeners, Shawn and Serevnt separate confirmed fact from rumor: TrendForce's primary-source DRAM data and Jensen Huang's own earnings-call words anchor the root cause (AI and HBM are crowding out gaming memory), while RTX 50 Super shelving and the August AIC price policy stay flagged as unconfirmed. The conversation deliberately fights itself in three places — Shawn rejects Serevnt's "a frozen cycle is wallet-friendly" opener; Serevnt counters Shawn's "static hardware forces optimization" with lazy-port evidence; and both independently confess to the same memory-squeeze miscalculation, the publisher who mis-tiered a spec sheet and the studio that bought workstations at the peak. They close on a human note: after recording, Shawn finally listed his mistaken dev machines at a loss — because when the industry skips you, you stop waiting for the next thing to save you.

* **TrendForce press release (2026-07-03):** traditional DRAM contract prices projected to rise **+13%–18%** in Q3 2026.
* **Jensen Huang, earnings call (2026-02-27):** "even if we wanted to ship more gaming GPUs, GDDR7 supply can't be guaranteed."
* **NVIDIA FY2026 Q4 (qtr ending 2026-01-25):** total revenue ~$68.1B; Datacenter $62.3B (**91.75%**); Gaming $3.7B (**5.45%**).
* **RTX 5090 D v2:** China-specific regional compliant model sold only in mainland China; channel price rose ~**+2000 RMB** (ZOTAC / ChannelGate, June).
* **RTX 60 (Rubin):** widely reported slipped to **late 2027 / 2028** — roughly a three-year gap, longest in the modern GPU era.
* *(Rumor-flagged)* RTX 50 Super refresh shelved; 3-gigabit GDDR7 module ~3× the cost of 2-gigabit; exact August AIC price bump pending; full DLSS 5 control rollout pending.

What happens when the game stops being a game and becomes the shift? In this episode of Gamers With Attitude PODCAST, Shawn and Serevnt dig into 代练 (paid boosting) and 搬砖 (grinding for sellable in-game currency) — the Chinese phenomenon where players turned play into real labor and real livelihoods. We trace the history, sit inside the internet café and the studio dorm, and ask the uncomfortable questions the industry prefers to leave unanswered. The Western assumption that gaming is "just for fun" gets reshaped, and three conflicts are left exactly where they belong: open.

**The one line:** In China, a whole generation turned games into jobs, and the West's "play for fun" assumption was never the only way to live inside a game.


**Three arguments, with receipts:**


1. Boosting (代练) and grinding (搬砖) are distinct economies — one sells labor on your account, the other sells produced goods into the market — and both became real livelihoods, not hobbies. — (as discussed in episode)
2. The grind can out-earn local factory or delivery work, putting real food on real tables, while carrying a cost (no pension, no transferable skill, ban risk) that no one prices. — (public reporting)
3. Publishers both ban and depend on the tradable economy: a dead market is a dead game, so they enforce the rulebook while quietly needing the grinders who keep it alive. — (public statement)


**Three takeaways:**


* The line between "playing" and "working" was never as clean as the hobby wanted to believe; someone was always working so someone else could play.
* A banned account is not a slap on the wrist for a grinder — it is a closed factory and a family's income deleted with no appeal.
* The Western "gold farmer" was our discomfort exported; China simply made the gray market visible, while the West laundered the same exchange through official monetization.


If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.