If China ruled the (gaming) world: 7 things we might have to get used to

Once upon a time, video games were almost solely the domain of US developers (and one pesky Russian puzzle master). Following the crash in the 80s and Nintendo’s rise to power, Japan spent almost two decades as king in the eyes of many. After a few years of things swinging back in the US’s favour, we might be seeing the emergence of a third dominant force—China.

(See: In 2017, the global games market with be Asian)

It’s no secret that China is on the rise in a big way, or that China’s games industry is experiencing a similar rise to prominence. With Asia set to dominate the global games market by 2017, driven largely by massive growth in China, we could be seeing a whole different gaming landscape within just a few years.

Below we’ve gathered the seven major changes we might see if China are going to be our new gaming overlords.

1. Competition will be king, narrative will be niche

It’s no secret that China is in love with competitive games. Be they directly competitive like Counter Strike or any of the myriad MOBAs they sink hundreds of hours into, or just the bragging rights you get from being the best on your MMO server, it’s clear that Chinese gamers are fiercely competitive.

(See: Chinese net cafe gamers played 30 billion minutes of MOBA games in July)

They’re hardly unique—we’ve all seen this kind of gamer outside of China, too. The kind of person who skips all the quest text and just follows the big arrow to the objective in World of Warcraft. Or has played a thousand hours of League of Legends but has no idea what Demacia is besides that thing Garen yells every now and again. But in China, this is the vast majority of online gamers.

China does actually have some gamers who, despite living under the yoke of a fourteen year console ban, find a way to play some of the world’s best single-player story-based games. Fan translations of Japanese RPGs are even more common in Chinese than they are in English, with fans having fully translated Japan-only gems like SaGa 3’s DS remake years before English-speaking fans managed to do the same. And it was Chinese group Shenzhen Nanjing that famously made the Final Fantasy VII NES ‘demake’.

But for all the passion these gamers show, they’re fairly few in number and so for now remain a niche. Mainstream Chinese gamers have yet to be won over by single-player narrative experiences. So if China dominates gaming any time soon, we’ll likely see a glut of what to them is tried-and-true—online multiplayer games that seek to satisfy the most competitive among us.

2. Everyone outside China is going to get pretty familiar with the Three Kingdoms