Black Myth: Wukong Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs | Hacker News Reader

Black Myth: Wukong Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs

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31 pointsjicea53 comments

This feels like an inflection point where the Chinese gaming industry might start to dominate. The game is certainly popular and there's a lot of positive buzz around the gameplay.

A lot of people are tired of hamfisted messaging in their entertainment so I don't think the publisher's ban on the topics mentioned in the article is going to dissuade many of the target audience.

The Chinese gaming industry seem to make games for gamers, while the western gaming industry seems obsessed with unsuccessfully "converting" people that don't play games, as if they are some kind of untapped market.

Well King and Blizzard are in Activision, and at least some years ago in their balance sheets we saw that King has a similar operating income as Blizzard. Those silly mobile games rake in some cash.

One can also ask how Tencent and NetEase is buying up stakes in everyone if they were not making money. There cannot be that much free money from CCP...

The gaming industry, regardless of where it's headquartered, is actually focused on aggressive, shameless monetization, and the Chinese segment were pioneers in this.

The western studios are focusing on making games for "modern audiences" which amounts to around a hundred people. I kid you not.

https://steamdb.info/app/721180/charts/

What first-party(Sony) title for 150 million buys:

https://steamdb.info/app/2443720/charts/

Valve just announced that games existence a few days ago and it's still deep in development. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make based upon its count of early play-testers?

I think you're mixing games up? The Valve game is called Deadlock and currently has 76,000 people playing it.

Which game are you referring to? Both that I mentioned are fully released

This feels like a more verbose version of "keep politics out of videogames", which ignores how videogames have always had political messages. Every call of duty game has been a commentary on the military industrial complex and war. Final Fantasy VII had an eco-terrorism group fighting against an evil corporation. Short of perhaps pacman, videogames have and will always carry a message.

Also, if this is how the Chinese industry dominates, they're going to give up a good half of their userbase. The streaming prohibition against feminist messaging aside, the leadership of the development studio has been exceptionally sexist and misogynist in their public messages. Even if you set aside the potential to misconstrue idioms (which even Chinese news sites have called sexist), they've outright said that Black Myth Wukong is not for women, since they're only interested in sims style games.

Chinese games come with their own areas of messaging - don't acknowledge Taiwan, don't show skulls, don't criticise communism, etc.

My favorite streamer shuts down politics chat immediately. "Let's talk about videogames instead."

It's nice, you all can discuss politics literally anywhere else.

As opposed as I am to the constant infusion of politics into media (and I'm quite opposed to it) this also seems pretty bad. Why restrict the streamers? More importantly, why would any streamer listen to a video game developer? Literally nothing is at stake.

This only applies to streamers who got the game for free.

I think this is a bad practice, but it's an already well established practice with 'review outlets'.

I remember seeing a yt video a while ago where a reviewer talked about the review embargo they received for some tech gadget(phone?) and how ridiculous it was. But in the end if they wanted to publish a video on lauch day the only option they had was to play ball with these rules.

Politics and forced messaging has wormed its way into every aspect of life - I’ll never not be okay with removing it from one of those aspects.

> More importantly, why would any streamer listen to a video game developer? Literally nothing is at stake.

Getting early access to the next game is at stake. It's the same "access journalism" playbook gaming companies have always run.

Streamers may receive the game for free, early, or be paid by publishers in exchange for coverage

What's at stake is the reputation of developer Game Science, which isn't great atm.

There was an exposé a year ago (https://www.ign.com/articles/how-black-myth-wukong-developer...) for leaked documents revealing sexism, misogyny, talking about genitals, etc. Apparently the lead creator is prone to saying stuff on social media, like "I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until I can’t get an erection."

Those are gross mistranslations, and that article has been widely pilloried as yellow journalism.

The "reputation" of games companies is something these games journalists use as "protection racket" strategy -- whereby they obtain access/credibility/etc. by "protecting" the reputation of the companies for which they otherwise concoct accusations.

The strategy is a common media tactic today: 1) find some way of drumming up an accusation; 2) demand an apology "on behalf of" some group involved in your attack; 3) thereby centre yourself as the important arbiter of online drama; 4) profit from views/access journalism/etc.

The only counter-strategy to this is to ignore it.

Widely pilloried by Mark Kern, and really only Mark. Every followup article points back to them, or the single reddit comment he uses as his source.

Mark is not someone I'd trust to be even handed when it comes to people being sexist or not. There have been China based news outlets who have remarked how sexist the statements were.

Plus, he conveniently ignores the statement which isn't so easily misconstrued, where the developer claims Black Myth Wukong isn't for women, since they aren't good enough and should stick to sims games.

You're either doing this in bad faith or allowed yourself to be played by gaming "journalists". This is a gross mistranslation of Chinese idioms.

I only became aware of all the bruha about "Black Myth: Wukong" after i'd already bought it and my first thought was OMG is tripitaka missing ????(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8_bNY_4VF4)

Anyhow the politics and commotion only exists if you follow twitter.

Here is a thought: by banning some but not all politically charged topics, you actually are introducing politics.

Most of the people I see posting about "politics" (not actual politics like elections and legislation) mean "anything I personally disagree with is political and should be shut down because I don't like it".

This applies equally to both sides before someone calls me a partisan hack.

Well said. Imagine if the Nazi regime had a "no politics" clause that they used to censor things that went against them. This is what is happening here.

Seems entirely reasonable. And something that more media companies should do. If you want to yell politics don't do it while showing someone else's product.

I think this is probably the right take. Streaming a video game is a legal grey area, and effectively the video game developer giving you the right to show copyrighted material for free -- a benefit with enormous value (given how many millions flow into streaming).

It seems a reasonable limitation that the game developer can require people profiting from their copyrighted works to do so with some limitations.

These should not apply to fair use situations, eg., parody/review/etc. But it seems highly plausible that streaming a video game is outside of fair use, and enabled by video game companies as a marketing strategy. For many video games, a stream of them replaces the point of playing them, so anti-fair use.

Any sense of entitlement streamers have to this IP I think is misplaced.

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