Hotcakes: These Are Two Different Games

Literally clones.

Here at MMO Fallout one tiny fracture of the gaming industry that I love to mock are these Chinese browser games that literally get pumped out by the hundreds on an annual basis, most of which stick around in China but many of which have been getting put out on Steam. I don’t talk about these games because there are thousands of them. Literally. Maybe not on Steam, there’s probably a few hundred on there.

I made fun of Monkey King Online six years ago, and while I can’t take credit for demolishing the industry I will say that the number of these games getting translated into English seems to have dramatically fallen since my article was used to absolutely shame the developers at GDC China. I have a theory on these games and that theory is that a source code was leaked back in 2010 or a hacked version was put up on the internet and since then a relatively smaller number of Chinese developers have been pumping out versions of the same game under thousands of shell companies.

Look at this screenshot.

Now look at this screenshot.

But Connor, you’re showing me two screenshots from the same game. What’s the big deal? Those are two allegedly separate games from two allegedly separate companies. The first game translates to God and I’m not making that up, it was developed by Zhu God Game. The second screenshot is from a game titled Fei Xian Jue by developer Fei Xian Jue. Totally not a fake shell corp.

Now if you move a couple of those UI elements around, maybe add some opacity to a few of the menus, and make the utility hotbar bigger…Let’s look at screenshot number 3.

This one is the game Feng Shen Chuan, by developer Feng Shen Chuan who is also totally not a fake shell corporation. Everyone knows the legit developers name their games after their company. Ignoring the complete diversity in art style, interface design, and probably 99.999999% of the content, one thing these games do have in common is that they were complete failures on Steam. All of them have shut down, or at least retired their store fronts. They all had very few reviews and none of them positive.

If you could distill the essence of Little Caesars Pizza into a video game, these are what you would get. Mass produced, cheap, recycled. I think for the most part it’s like venture capitalism but for video games where if one in a thousand of these hits it big it will pay for the cost of the rest of the group plus countless more dollars. I can’t imagine that there’s much work that goes into each individual title since most of the code is already done. Maybe write in some crappy lines of dialogue and change the logo.

This is what I entertain myself with while reading through the stuff that pops up on Steam. I don’t even know what point I’m trying to come to, just to stick a finger at the fact that these games keep coming out month after month, day after day. And I’m willing to bet that the $100 Steam placement fee is the most expensive part of making one of these games nowadays. That and perhaps the hour’s wage it takes to create the logo and fill in the submission form.