Tokyo: Being coveted by my wife, I just want to play games

Although Dongchuan Che has been busy with work recently, basically everything at home is on track.

In early September, he sent Sayuri Sato to Funan Boarding High School in Gunma Prefecture.

To be honest, it is not a big deal for a 16-year-old girl to go to school in another city alone. After all, not to mention going to college in another city after graduating from high school, there are many people who went to big cities to study alone from small counties during high school.

but

Sato Fujiko, who was crying because of worry, still went to Gunma secretly that night accompanied by Fuyukawa Che, and watched the girl walk into the school gate with her luggage.

Of course, Ohara Nanako, a little girl who cares about her best friend, also accompanied them. After the matter of Sayuri Sato was dealt with, Fuyukawa Tetsu became busy again.

For no other reason than this year's summer Tokyo Game Festival is coming.

Normally, the most popular game awards in the world in the past few years were still events like TGA and IGN in the United States, but.

On the one hand, these European and American awards are very ugly. If you want to get high scores, you have to spend a lot of money on public relations. Some works of big companies, even if they are terrible, obviously behind the times, or even full of bugs, can still get good scores as long as the public relations are in place.

Moreover, ZZZQ in Europe and the United States has now extended to the field of games. Any game without black girls or black guys will be given a low score. Any game with a heroine who is too sexy or has a body that is not in line with common sense can be used as a deduction item.

To be honest, these are not the problems.

Whether it's spending money on PR, ZZZQ, or the female characters being too sexy, these are not the key points.

If spending money on public relations can bring huge attention and thus make the game make more money, then after weighing the pros and cons, game manufacturers will not be too resistant to this unspoken rule and will at most accept it with a pinch of their nose.

If ZZZQ such as skin color diversity can gain recognition from players and help the game make more money, game manufacturers will not be too resistant to this idea.

If players really don't like sexy and beautiful female characters, but instead like the heroine in "Extinction 2" who is scarier than the Night Stalker, then most game manufacturers will actually adjust their character images.

But the problem is!

This is just an ideology forced out by those awards!

How many non-colored players would want to control a black character and date a black girl with dreadlocks? This is not a question of ZZ discrimination, it's just a simple difference in aesthetics.

Similarly, how many male players around the world don’t want to see sexy and beautiful female characters in games?

this is the key of the problem!

These awards may be given due to social pressure, may be for the purpose of making money, or may be an ideology forced out to increase control over game companies, but no matter what the reason, doing so is going against the preferences of players!

The key here is that there is a strong conflict between these ideas and players' preferences!

This is a huge pit, but some game companies have actually fallen into it.

Some time ago, French Potato Factory announced that their game, which is set in the Japanese Warring States Period, would use a black man as the male protagonist.

It's funny to say that the French Potato Factory in this life is similar to Ubisoft in the previous life, both of which are very prestigious game companies. Therefore, before they hold a new game press conference, players all over the world pay close attention, especially Japanese players.

When Japanese players heard that the company was going to make a 3A game based on the Japanese Warring States period, they were extremely excited and there were heated discussions in the forums every day.

Some players even came to the GOGO platform to post questions, questioning Dongchuan Che why he didn't make a game on the Warring States theme. Now that the French have taken the lead, the French have made a big splash.

Quite funny.

A bunch of haters were still yelling and cursing crazily the day before, accusing Toru Fuyukawa of not promoting Japan's traditional culture and that he should learn more from the French Potato Factory. But the next day, after the black male protagonist of the French Potato Factory appeared on the Internet, the entire comment section fell silent.

All Japanese players were furious and flocked to various social media to curse the French potato factory, causing the company's stock price to plummet.

Dongchuan Che could actually understand the players' angry emotions. After all, it was like foreigners saying they wanted to make a game based on the Three Kingdoms, but ended up using a Japanese as the protagonist.

However, he could also understand why the French potato factory did this. On the one hand, the skin color and orientation ZZZQ issue is indeed very serious abroad now, and if it is not handled properly, it is easy to be labeled.

On the other hand, many awards are also taking advantage of this opportunity and using the influence of their own awards to influence public opinion on game manufacturers.

For example, before the release of the previous game "Black Monkey", IGN published an article accusing Black Monkey of "sex discrimination".

It caused quite a stir at the time, but later we found out that the reporter who wrote the article on "Gender Discrimination" was a member of SweetBaby, a studio that "provides narrative consulting for games during development to promote diversity, fairness, and inclusion in game narratives and studios."

The main reason this reporter wrote this article was because Black Monkey's team rejected the $7 million [hush money] from SweetBaby Studios.

A game extorted 7 million dollars! And according to industry insiders, SweetBaby has been doing this for nearly a decade.

Just think about how much profit is generated from this, and how many powerful people are supporting this interest chain and sucking blood from it.

Some studios even ask game manufacturers to pay them hush money, asking them not to focus on the lack of people of color in games when reviewing games. Some studios even go directly to game companies to collect [diversity guidance fees].

To put it simply, some companies have to hire commentators and journalists to put their names on their companies. It doesn't matter whether there is diversity guidance on skin color and orientation, what matters is that they have to pay wages.

And

These groups are particularly unfriendly to Asian games, or charge extra high fees.

As the saying goes, where there is oppression, there is resistance.

Since last year, the Japanese gaming industry has been planning to support the Tokyo Game Festival and make it a gaming carnival and authoritative gaming award with great influence like TGA.

To achieve this, the Tokyo Game Festival must have very influential games participating in the selection, as well as influential game producers and game companies participating. When it comes to these three points, in today's game industry, Toru Fuyukawa is a name that cannot be avoided.

It's quite troublesome.

To be honest, Dongchuan Che is no longer very interested in TGA or Tokyo Game Festival.

Now that the Holy Light Society’s signboard has been put up, the popularity of the GOGO platform is also rising. It is considered one of the largest game platforms and game exchange communities in the world.

Therefore, even if he does not participate in any game awards, it will have little impact on him. As long as he releases the game and relies on the promotional power of the GOGO platform, players will still flock to it. But this matter is more important to other manufacturers in the Japanese game industry.

After September, people came to visit him almost every day. Not only did acquaintances in the gaming industry come to say good things about him, but many officials from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs also came forward to invite him to attend the Tokyo Game Festival.

Even in the end, Ms. Inuzuka was moved out by these noisy guys.

Ms. Inuzuka is the former managing director of SATE, and can be considered the mentor of Miyano Miyano and Sato Fujiko. When Toru Fuyukawa invited Japanese game manufacturers to join the GOGO platform in the SATE building, it was she who helped to support the event. Her daughter is now working as a secretary for Miyano Miyano.

Ms. Inuzuka not only has a very good reputation in the Japanese gaming industry, but also helped him a lot in the past. So, under her persuasion and lobbying, Toru Fuyukawa finally chose to come forward to help support the Tokyo Game Festival.

but

It's really boring.

Tokyo Game Festival is not some dragon-slaying event.

Although Japanese manufacturers now support the Tokyo Game Festival, it seems that it is because TGA and European and American media such as IGN have cut too much losses, but there has never been any story of a dragon slayer and a dragon in this world. There are only challenges from young dragons to the status and wealth of old dragons.

Before the Tokyo Game Festival even started, SATE's managing director Kuriyama came to the company to find him, Toru Fuyukawa, saying that he hoped to get his support so that SATE could have a bigger voice in the Tokyo Game Festival. The reason for wanting to have a voice is naturally to harvest other manufacturers in the future like TGA and IGN.

Dongchuan Che did not have any resistance to this practice. The capital world was a place where the big fish ate the small fish, or the strong ate the weak. He was just too lazy to get involved. After all, if he had the time, he might as well make a few more games and earn more.

But now Executive Director Kuriyama is going to rush to the front and he doesn't have to work so hard himself. He has also promised him some preferential terms such as [reduced commission for Holy Light Society games logged on to PH console platform] [SATE exclusive games will be unlocked earlier and then logged on to GOGO platform], so naturally, Dongchuan Che has no reason to refuse.

Therefore, as the Tokyo Game Festival approached, Toru Fuyukawa asked Kawaguchi and Ame to start cooperating with the Tokyo Game Festival to promote the game. In addition to works such as "World of Warcraft" and "Pokemon" that were about to release trailers, the main promotional content was "Elden Ring".

In the past, the Tokyo Game Festival was not strictly an awards ceremony, but more like a carnival, mainly for players to have fun and promote games. But now, because it has to compete with European and American awards such as TGA and IGN, this year's Tokyo Game Festival also attaches great importance to the awarding of awards.

To be honest, because last year was a big year for games, with SATE and NICO releasing many blockbusters, this year's Tokyo Game Festival was actually quite entangled in terms of awards. However, there was no controversy about the "Game of the Year" award.

The original work of "Elden Ring" is already of very high quality, but due to the company's financial constraints and the size of the development team of FS, the original work of "Elden Ring" still lacks certain polishing in some aspects, and the experience will decline in the later stages of the game.

In fact, the same is true for "Black Myth: Wukong" in this regard.

Even though these 3A masterpieces take four to five years to develop, with a team of hundreds of people, the time is still very tight.

Because once the development cycle is too long, or a large number of staff are added, these small and medium-sized game manufacturers will face pressure from investors, and the company will also face problems with the capital chain.

Therefore, unless you have no shortage of money and want to be a top-notch company with a good reputation to do development, even if the development team is very talented, under the pressure of time and funds, problems are still likely to occur in the later stages. But Dongchuan Che does not have this problem.

On the one hand, he has money and connections, and on the other hand, he knows that these games will be popular, so he can completely focus on super-detailed polishing and improvements.

He made a lot of optimizations to the later maps such as the Snowfield, Sky City, Underground World, Holy Tree, etc. Not only did the types of monsters increase, but the plot content also increased, rather than simply stacking numbers in the previous life.

The sales of the improved "Elden Ring" exceeded 30 million in less than two months after its release. With the summer promotion activities of the GOGO platform during this summer vacation, the sales of "Elden Ring" reached 40 million!