China’s Looming Threat to the World of Gaming
Episode Notes
Transcript
On this week’s episode, Sonny broaches the topic of China and gaming with Colin Moriarty, founder and CEO of Last Stand Media, the world’s most popular fan-funded games podcast network, co-host of Sacred Symbols: A PlayStation Podcast, and 20-year veteran of the gaming industry. Colin has firsthand experience in this realm as a game developer and relays a pretty interesting story about the chilling effect China can have on the art of gaming. Beyond that, there’s much to consider about the dangers of mergers and consolidation. Does the government have a role to play in keeping Chinese Communist Party-controlled firms like Tencent from dominating the gaming space? Should the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States play a firmer role? These are some of the questions we ask, but don’t necessarily have answers for, on this week’s episode. If you found this episode informative and entertaining, please share it with a friend!
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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This episode is brought to you by Smart Food, the sweet salty snack you need this holiday season, air pop popcorn, tossed in delicious white cheddar cheese, or mix with sweet caramel and cheddar. It’s the perfect snack for your smart holiday party. Shop now at snacks dot com. Welcome back to the Bulwark House of Hollywood. My name is Sunny Barns, I’m culture editor at the bulk work.
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And I’m very, very pleased to be joined today by Colin Moriarty, who is the founder and CEO of last stand media, the world’s most popular fan funded Games Podcast Network guy. He’s co host of sacred symbols, a Playstation podcast, and a twenty year veteran of the gaming industry. Thanks for being on the show column.
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Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here. So
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I wanted to have you on because last week for the Washington Post, I wrote a column about Chinese influence on gaming. It’s a it’s a topic that I find interesting, but I don’t know a ton about, frankly. And you reached out. We we had a little bit of a chat. And I wanna I wanna fill people in on this because it’s really interesting and and it’s different from the ways in which China, I think, has been manipulating hollywood and Hollywood content and it’s very important in real ways, but it’s also very similar just in terms of the overall efforts at control.
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But I wanna give listeners who, you know, are not necessarily gamers who are listening to this podcast wanna give them a sense of the size and scope of the industry because people know about how big the movie industry is, who listen to me. I don’t think they realized that
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the video game industry really dwarfs it, again, size. Yeah. So I think this year, the global games market is projected to surpass two hundred billion dollars in revenue, which is substantially more than movies and music, TV, and then combined. And what’s interesting about it is that people buy into games at all different levels and stratifications. You have free to play gamers.
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That do it a dollar at a time. Some of them get by without paying. You have whales that pay a lot, so called whales that pay a lot. And then you go all the way up to the top. High end PCs were thousands of dollars, sixteen seventy dollar games bought several times a month or annually or biannually.
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And I think the buy in of the product, you need a console or a PC, typically a phone. I think that this keeps the money flowing because the investment is large. You wanna make sure you’re getting something out of your investment. You’re five hundred dollars PS five for instance. So you go and spend hundreds of dollars a year to make sure that games are coming and going into that machine and out of that machine.
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And so I just think it’s I think you’re right that a lot of people don’t realize how big it is and how ubiquitous, you know, PlayStation four, for instance, which is not really the the common console played in the Playstation ecosystem anymore is a hundred and fifteen million units sold. I mean, they’re a hundred and fifteen million of those things in people’s living rooms. It’s it’s quite unbelievable.
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Yeah. And and let’s talk a little bit about the stratification because I think a a separate thing people don’t quite understand is the difference between mobile gaming and, you know, console gaming and PC gaming. Because I mean, like, everybody imagines when they say video games are, like, oh, if you’re a little bit older, it’s like, oh, Mario brothers. Right? Yeah.
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Sure. You put the console. You got console. You stick the thing in there. And that is the, like, transfer to PlayStation Xbox, etcetera.
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Right? Like, I go in and I buy a copy of God of War four and I put it in my PlayStation five and I play it. It’s great. That’s the last game I played by the way. Thanks.
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I’m very very kind
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of eighteen. Yeah. Yeah.
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Exactly. So but the but the the the real money it seems is in mobile gaming Right? I mean, that is like that is the where where a huge portion of the the marketplace is right now.
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Yeah. Mobile gaming, which is something we don’t cover on our programming. But is huge. We usually don’t cover it because we’re not into it, but also because there’s a casualness there. That’s kind of cyclical.
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So your casual to play a mobile game. You’re too casual to read about the mobile game. You just play the mobile game. So there’s no other kind of interface with that. And people learned that a long time ago with Farmville in like there’s just no way to cover this stuff.
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But nonetheless, people play these games by the millions, tens of millions. And yeah, what’s so fascinating about it, I think, is that this started mostly on phone and on Facebook in other places. And it’s kind of infiltrated and some might even say infected our space is console gaming, PC gaming, higher end core gaming as it’s called. But most of these players are actually maybe even able to cross between games. For instance, there’s a call of Duty game on mobile.
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There’s a call of Duty game on PC that plays with the consoles. The consoles can play with each other. You can play some mobile games that interface with console games. So people are all over the place now. And the idea of cross play and kind of bringing everyone together through these various monetary devices.
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And, of course, technical devices is like all the rage right now. Proprietary stuff is kind of falling apart. And so, yeah, a lot of people are playing on just very basic browser or iOS or Android games that really require no input. Very little money. And if you have millions and millions of these people playing, you just scrape pennies at a time and you make a ton of
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money. Yeah. And And where the question gets into it with art is the so called triple a games. Right? So when when we’re talking about, you know, you know, a Farmville style game is just something that you do.
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It’s mind mindless, you know, you’re just killing time, whatever. But a game a game in the in the PlayStation five or Xbox ecosystem is gonna be treated a little more seriously. You know? Again, I’m I’m terrible with, like, current reference points. So I’m just gonna stick with God of War four here.
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Okay. So, like, you know, that that’s like that that’s a that’s a game where you have, like, real questions about, like, what is it what does it mean to be of a god and a deity? What is like, you know, what is what is the the the purpose of power? What is it what does it mean to be a decent? And that that that is a question that art has wrestled with for a long time.
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So, you know, when we start talking about the arts in China, one thing that comes up a lot is Chinese reluctance to let companies act freely. Right? No.
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Totally. Of I I talked to someone from the Rand Corporation about this last year. And he blew my mind. He had a lot of detailed information specifically about the way film companies interface with the CCP and So a company like Disney, for instance, or Marvel, the Marvel movies that they they hold. And he was saying that the the holdover, the CCP’s kind of onus on whatever they want is so powerful that things like time travel are illegal in movies because it undoes the repage it can undone undo the revolution.
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Right? You have to, like, there are people at these companies that exist entirely to rework scripts and make sure things aren’t in there so that they can get them by the goalie in these specific places. It’s completely bent out of shape. And we have our own experience actually because I I co own a game developer, an indie developer called the Lilimo. We make old school two d games.
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We love them. There’s cheap what we call weekend games. And I write those games. And I wrote a an enemy appendix for one of our games. It’s a baking game where you’re playing as a baker and so the enemies are all like food that come to life.
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And I wrote an input about a toaster And I wrote about how the toaster was made for a dollar a day in a Chinese factory, and that was in the game. And we got to kick back to us. It had to be edited out of the game on PlayStation four and PlayStation five because it brings them into problems with the CCP if they ever wanna do business there or whatever. So if you download our game for perils of baking. On PC, Xbox, or Switch, it’s in there.
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If you download it on PlayStation four or PlayStation five, it’s not because we would have gotten in trouble for having it there.
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That’s see, that’s fascinating me. Now was that was that a directive that came from PlayStation? It’s like their store?
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Yeah. It’s in there. It’s in the you when you get your dev kits and you and you agree to be on the PlayStation Store or any of these stores in Nintendo Switch, you have a, you know, a user agreement that you agree to and and all the rest buried in there low and behold when we were writing the game, our producer came to realize it’s like look at this. It literally specifically says you cannot say, Taiwan is a country. You cannot acknowledge Taiwan is being independent or tried.
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And so, yeah, it’s a it’s a really it’s a really interesting thing that I think a lot of people are talking and not talking about, which is why I was so grateful to see your article because and why I reach out to you, there were a mutual friend of ours know on Bloom because no one is talking about this. In other spaces, I’m a very political person too, and it’s I’m I’m frustrated. Sometimes I’ve wanted to, like, think about writing an op ed and trying to contribute it somewhere getting it out there to be, like, people need to pay attention on what’s going on here. It’s quite onerous. It means a lot more in our space because there’s so much more money and engagement in our space.
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You go into know, there’s nothing wrong with film, but you go in and see a film for three hours and you’re in and out. You know, if you play Genshi impact, which is made by Mihoyo, a a Chinese company, that’s potentially hundreds of hours of your life. You know? Yeah. Maybe thousands depending on how intimate you are.
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Totally different engagement, and therefore, I think it really requires people to pay attention to these these small little nibbles at the corner that I think infringe our ability to express ourselves and games are the most beautiful art form to express yourself. So that’s the biggest bummer to me. Yeah. I
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mean, it’s it’s really interesting. I and the other the other thing, you know, the when I say it’s it’s a slightly different thing that China is doing in the video game space. As opposed to the movie space. That is a very simple like, that story that you just told, I’ve heard that from half a dozen people in the film industry. Like, no, we can’t we can’t
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have a
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plot line about Taiwan on our show. Are you like, we would just never it would never come up. It would never even cross our minds. But the but the the the other thing that China is doing, which is a little bit different than what they what they are doing in the in the movie space. Is it in the video game world?
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They are just buying up companies. Yes. Right? I mean, like, I that’s the thing I was most struck by was just how much how much how many companies Tencent the Chinese firm has actually purchased over the last decade or so? Yeah.
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So you think about Chinese gaming and this is something we always talk about on our show, it really comes down into like five corporate buckets. And the biggest corporate bucket is Tencent. They’re easily the number one like you say. They are a Google sized company with more than a hundred thousand employees, tons of money, lots of power, major CCP influence at the company, I think something like ten percent of the adult population in China are CCP members, but twenty eight percent of Ten cents. Employees are or CCP members, so about two and a half times more.
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And I think something like according to the Taiwan News, eighty percent of those people at Tencent are in leadership or key positions. So that’s the big bucket. And then I would say that there are there is a second bucket, which is NetEase, which is another company, and they’re the second, I think, biggest, and then there are three others. Tini LayOut and Mihoyo, which I brought up earlier. What’s ironic though?
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About Tencent is Tencent owns two of those companies in addition to a bunch of other things. And I it’s concerning because I don’t think people understand quite what they own and what they’re doing as they’re trying to infiltrate boardrooms and I always tell my audience, it’s a matter of a moneyed interest being in a space and time where it’s like you kind of just buy your way in, maybe get a board seat. You sit there, you you learn, you observe, and then the time comes when it’s like, well, we need money for another project. We need we need investment. We need someone to take the risk and they’re like, oh, we have money.
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You know, like, what we have we have the money to to do what you need. And so they start small. They own five percent of Ubisoft. Right? Which is I don’t think a lot of people know.
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They own something like sixteen percent of from software that developer behind Eldon Ring, which is the biggest game of the year. They own a hundred percent of Riot, which makes League of Legends there over in Santa Monica where I used to live. They make League of Legends one of the biggest PC games ever. They own a hundred percent of Sumo Digital, one of the biggest third party developers. They own Super Sell.
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Which does a lot of mobile gaming. They own forty percent of Epic. Epic
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uses
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Epic doesn’t only run its store. Epic has on real engine, which is the infrastructure of many AAA games. They own thirteen percent of Kraft on, which is the the creators of pub g, the the battle royale game, They own pieces of Discord. They own pieces of Roblox. You know?
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They own paradox. They made a new piece of paradox. They they made a new western branding called Level Infinite that’s trying to whitewash kind of who they are. People should go look into this. Level infinite sponsors the video game awards for the last two years.
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No one knows that that’s actually Tencent paying for that show. So it’s happening very onerous, but it’s happening because they are scared of their domestic market. Which I don’t think a lot of people have really put two and two together. They can’t really make money there. So by virtue of survival, their capitalistic instincts even though they are these communist entities.
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Come out and they say, we need to leave because we can’t they’re they’re keeping kids off of phones. You know, they are locking kids out of PC cafes. They’re making sure that they won’t play too much or do this or that. And so they need to get out. And they go to the west where we can do whatever we want.
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So it’s incredibly shady and it bugs me out that more people aren’t talking about it because Tencent isn’t a small company. You know, Tencent I think they run WeChat and all that kind of stuff, which is also huge in China, but they just have great social control when and it’s implied. I don’t think it’s explicit, it’s implied. And I don’t know if you saw by the way, Tencent just announced yesterday that they hired Sean Layton. Who was Sean Layton?
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Sean Layton was the I can’t you can’t curse on this show. Right? Is the freaking was the CEO of PlayStation? The CEO of PlayStation? Now that left a couple years ago, who is a creative mind, a producer, worked a long time at Playstation, going all the way back to the nineties?
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They gobbled him up, you know, that the company NetEase I talked about. They attracted a guy named Toshi Hero Nagoshi who was a big sega talent who created the yakuza franchise. They pulled him away from there after twenty five years. What is a studio called Nagoshi Studios? Who is it owned by NetEase?
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You know, it’s it’s very sad what’s happening out there. And it’s it’s it’s part of the consolidative efforts in the games industry widely. Microsoft is a huge part of it. But these Chinese companies are aggressive and a lot of people don’t know. Tencent is the you know, I talked about that two hundred billion dollars.
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Some Tencent is the biggest slice of that. Yeah. I
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wouldn’t I wouldn’t hit on something that you mentioned just kind of been passing because I think it’s interesting. The the the Chinese efforts domestically in China to restrict the amount of gameplay by children. Now it’s interesting to me because that was a that was a thing that a lot of a lot of conservative ish people saw that. We’re like, oh, that’s maybe that’s not terrible. Why Maybe we should think about you know you know, props to China for for taking control of their kids.
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But it is it’s it’s interesting to me because in the context of the gaming world itself, the economics of gaming, that has to kill them there. Oh,
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yeah. Totally. They can’t it’s it’s just this is by virtue of survival. They’re it’s that’s what’s so funny about it is that they just can’t make a go of it in their own market. I mean, they have big games there.
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Games that usually don’t come out in the west that are big on mobile, big on p speak PC console space is is really just burgeoning in China. So and Chinese console games are just now emerging from there as well. So we’re still in nascent days there. But Yeah. They have real rule sets that I think will limit in a status way your access to video games.
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I actually don’t think it’s a bad idea if a parent wants to engage the parental controls on an Apple iPhone so that their kids can’t play games on weekdays or whatever. I just think a lot of people have a problem with a governmental body doing that. And it’s I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think I’m personally, I’m not here to advocate for video games. I just don’t think video games are looked at properly through the proper lens as an instructive potentially instructive medium.
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You know, I was talking about it recently with a teacher out on my show, we were talking about the future of education in games. And I asked him, I’m like, you were bringing up God of War, but I was bringing bring up even more dense games than that, an open world game like cyberpunk two thousand and seventy seven or something where I’m like, this is There’s probably seven or eight war in pieces in here. And there’s all these themes of politics and economics and social class and racism and all these things. I’m like, why couldn’t you actually learn a lot more by playing a video game than even reading a book at this point. So it’s important for me to advocate for the medium as well.
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And I think that anything that goes against people having access to that in a reasonable way, I think would be a problem to most of
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think it’s again, this is this is all super interesting. And I do think that there is You know, I I feel like we have transcended the Roger Ebert saying video games can never be art moment. Right?
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We’re we’re beyond that. But there is a still a question of like, well, what what does the art form actually mean? I mean, you know, it’s different from books and movies and and different from TV. But it is it is a a genuine art form that is that is filled with all sorts of I’m sorry. I’m rambling.
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The the the One thing one thing that I’ve seen folks talk about, and I I don’t have any idea really how to kind of measure this I don’t I don’t know I don’t know what the actual right answer is here. So I’m curious from your POV. You know, there’s there’s a lot of concern about Chinese games and their anti cheat softwares. You see this you see this come up from time to time that like folks folks are worried about putting these you know kind of root kit programs into their computer. They don’t wanna have the they don’t want the CCP to have access to it, etcetera, etcetera.
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Is that something folks should worry about? Or is that just kind of random scare money. I
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think it’s prob I mean, that probably is something to worry about if specifically on the PC space in the PC space or in the Android space where there’s just fewer controls. I can’t imagine that anything the CCP deploys on your iPhone is gonna get very far. They might be able to scrape data or something from you. And in the console space, those are such closed gardens
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that that there’s
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really no worry there. But if you’re in the PC space, you have a lot to worry about just not from any actor really. I mean, look what just happened with Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto six. I don’t know if you saw that this past weekend, but that’s a catastrophic leak that was that was garnered by a simple click of of a bad link. So anything could happen to anyone, but these closed gardens are pretty safe from that sort of stuff for now.
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But the point I was making earlier is that a lot of cross play between platforms requires these walls to be lowered and who knows where new vectors can come up. Sony is famously Sony is famous for eliminating hacking vectors when they find them, their old handheld, the PlayStation Vito, which we were a huge advocate of, they tried to kill that very quickly in two thousand sixteen, and it didn’t really work people still wanted to kill it because they couldn’t keep the firmware ahead of people hacking it. They were afraid that through the V that people would be able to hack the PlayStation network. So there are different strata and levels to it, and there’s really nothing to worry about at least in my space. Yeah.
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For the record, for folks who didn’t hear, I believe it was GTA six that got, like, early footage of which was released Right. By by hackers getting into rockstar’s system. Right. People are so games companies like everyone else are working remotely. These
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days or many of them are. But when you’re working remotely at a games company, you use a virtual machine to use your computer in the office. And that’s because the computer in the office is connected to the Internet. You can make you can submit your your stuff to what are called builds, builds are new compilations of everything in the game so they can be played or looked at. And so someone clicked a bad link that gave someone access to the Slack on those internal machines through the virtual machine and they were able to download apparently, some of the source code, which could be catastrophic, but ninety videos of the game early in development.
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And it’s just it’s just a bad look because much like, you know, I know you’re a film critic, people don’t wanna see well, I mean, some people like the behind the scenes stuff, but when you see it, you’re like, man, that’s it. You know, you haven’t seen the final product yet. So it’s it’s man, they they I actually I I was talking before we began. I did a show with a lawyer to talk about what happened over there, and he was talking about the disaster recovery plan that they probably executed, and then it’s like a fire. It’s very fascinating stuff.
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But that was an American company that happened to an American company. I’m actually technically rockstar’s British, but — Yeah. Yes.
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Yeah. Close enough. The well, I mean, the the international the internationalization of video games is is interesting because one thing that comes up, you know, as I’m as I’m reading all these stories about China and and video games is that it’s not really the American companies that are pushing back as hard as the Swedish companies. The the Swedes are very invested in making sure that this this sort of thing does not that China’s influences curtailed somewhat. And for instance, a couple years back, China went to the international organization for standardization, was trying to get that body to take over certain aspects of gaming in terms of, you know, again, just they say in terms of just technical specifications.
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But the the the the, I think, I I can’t remember the name of the Swedish trade group. They were like, no. No. You can’t do that. Video games are art.
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We can’t have it. You know, these aren’t light bulbs. It’s not baby seats and cars. We we need to have more freedom than that.
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Yeah. It’s it’s funny because we here in the States about ten years ago, the Supreme Court basically confirmed games as a freedom of expression as well, which is good. And I actually think it’s great. We talk about on sacred symbols the Chinese games that are starting to emerge, not many of them. We wanna play them because it should be clear that we have no problem with Chinese people.
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We just think the and that the creativity out of there is no doubt burgeoning and and ready to get out. I mean, can you imagine the pent up
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and
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creative energies of some of these places just want that are seeing everything going on in the west and wanna participate. So it’s nothing like that, but my my bigger problem is just that the government, the United States government, especially doesn’t seem to be consistent in their pursuit of Chinese corporations. They were all over Huawei, right, coming to to the west, which I thought was Great. You want? Why would we want them here?
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And they’re becoming I I saw a a Senate hearing this last week about TikTok, and I was like, this is another good thing because it’s I think it’s madness that tick we won’t use TikTok at our company because it’s it’s I can’t believe that people use it. And then so — Yep. — but Tencent just slips under. And it’s like I said earlier, so the biggest entertainment medium in the world, the most profitable entertainment medium in the world about one in every seven dollars is made by Tencent. This is a company people need to pay attention to.
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So while we have this inclination, I think naturally towards freedom of expression in the United States and it’s something I I firmly believe in, I think that we need to go after the root causes of of the issue here, which is not the creativity that could sprout out of that, but just the economic and creative ramifications of dealing with a a totalitarian dictatorship. I I just don’t understand what people don’t see about that. This is entertainment that’s in your in your on your TV and your kids face on your laptop.
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I
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mean, it’s time for people to wake up. That’s why I was so pleased that you’re talking about this. And why I’m so appreciative because it’s time for people to wake up. So
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a couple years back, there was a there was a committee on foreign investment in the United States investigation into some into one of these purchases. I I forget who it was that CFIUS was looking at kinda went nowhere because I guess people just don’t understand the size or the scale or the importance of these of these activities. Right? I think so too.
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I it’s so funny. I’m reading about it now. I I I looked up c c s or whatever like the one that I look up Yeah. SIFI is like the like the Greek spelling or the Latin spelling, and then it just came up with this. So it actually knew exactly what I was talking about.
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Okay. Cool. Because it’s CFI US. So — Yep. — yeah.
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I I really think it’s a matter of gay video games have somehow, I think just
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flown
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onto the radar. They continue to just flow you know, fly under the radar. Like, no one or very few people seem to realize their potential, the money that they make, the the ubiquity of the products, And I think that another major problem is just having people in office, and I’m sure you guys talk about this all the time. Just don’t know anything. Wouldn’t it Senator Blumenthal that was talking about something a few months ago in Facebook and he just sounded like an he sounded like an asshole.
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Yeah. Like it’s like this is a man who has to like, even pretend that you know what you’re talking about. So when you have people like that in charge, video games only come up in the most negative ways. And of course, video games went went through their most negative period in the United States, I would say, between nineteen ninety two and two thousand two or so with the rise of the ESRB, typical Joe Lieberman and then the government the, you know, the the video game industry much like other mediums decided to protect itself to keep the government out by creating a ratings board and then that brought in people like Jack Thompson, and people can go read about him. He was in a nut job from Florida, who was his lawyer, who actually got disbarred for his activities and trying to stymie the the the sale of Grand Theft Auto.
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A lot of crazy stuff and we’re past that moment now. So I think that it’s just kind of injected itself into our society, but people don’t really think about the ramifications of how the money is spent, where the money comes from, and what you have to do to create products, and it goes all the way down to the creation of the consoles themselves. There’s no fair trade PlayStation five. The PlayStation five you’re buying was made in China. No doubt at a at a at an unfair circumstances, you know.
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So it goes all the way down to the root and the companies themselves, all the way down to the other side of the government and there. Their blind eye towards these issues.
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Yeah. I mean, I like, it’s interesting to put it in that context because it it makes me wonder. I mean, I I I you know, I was ten or so in the in the early nineties when when all of this you know, with the fights over blood and mortal combat. And, you know, that sort of thing was going on. Right?
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And it it it I remember thinking at at the time this is idiotic. You’re all we’re like, kids aren’t dumb. We know what we’re we’re playing. We’re not, you know, we’re not being desensitized. To to real violence.
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That’s a video game. We’re all just having fun. But I do wonder if that has inculcated in a generation and the generations that followed a resistance to the government doing anything with video games, like stay just staying out of it entirely. So I mean, like, CFIUS looks at epic and riot and, like, they can’t really they’re like, we just don’t wanna get involved. We don’t want like, we we don’t want the headache of, you know, having to be thought of as sensors or thought of as interfering in the games industry.
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The government’s gone through that. We don’t want a part of that. I mean, do you think that there’s a lingering effect there?
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Definitely. There’s an anti I don’t want to say anti government, but just anti authoritarian, slant in video games You don’t understand video games. You don’t like video games. You make fun of us for playing video games. Just leave us alone kind of thing.
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And that I think is in DND and tabletop gaming. I think that’s in card gaming. I think that’s in a lot of different things. But it creates a sort of mysticism that I think is false around what is actually happening. Because again, I think most gamers would agree that we don’t want censorship.
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I think also most gamers agree that things like the ESRB makes sense and the ESRB and its creation, its self funding in the in the games industry in the nineties kept the government away. And I think that there’s some expectation that the government the industry be able to regulate itself before the government gets involved again, which is why I think it’s important to have powerful trade organizations and all the rest that can help do that. But it it’s I think what we unfortunately are going to need is the moment or the or the purchase or the game or the event. Where people see, oh, I get it. And I think it’s unfortunately gonna be something that’s outside of gaming.
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Maybe fortunately, like TikTok. Getting exposed or something like that where people are gonna start looking deeper and deeper and being like, oh, there are a lot of actually unsavory tethers here that fly way under the radar, that our anti authority and our hesitance to cooperate, let’s say, will end up hurting us. And we just don’t want that kind of money involved in the industry. It’s not, again, the creative aspect of it out of China. We want Chinese games.
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It’s just what comes along with the Chinese money? And that’s a question that needs to be asked. And again, like I said, with the PS five being created, when you buy an iPhone or something, you can’t live a moralistic economic life, but you need to ask I think the appropriate questions and make nips and tucks along the way so that you dodge things that you might not want to be a party to. Yeah.
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Yeah. No. I I I that’s one hundred percent exactly where I on this. I mean, I I think, like, have you have you played any of the games coming out of China? I mean, have you been have you have you experienced any No.
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I played a little bit of some of them, like, Genschen Impact, what is a big mihoyo, action RPG, call of Duty mobile, was made in China by a a studio called Tini, Pokemon Unite as well, which just came to Switch, and Quantic Dream, which is bought by NetEase, and they made a trilogy of Playstation games. Bungie was owned by NetEase for a while. Those are the creators of Destiny. Although Sony bought bungey from NetEase and other entities, making NetEase hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. So, yeah, we play some of those games in interface with them, but a lot of them are not being localized.
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So it’s hard for us to see too much of them, although you can look up a thing called Playstation. I wanna say it’s called Playstation China Stars. Which was this PlayStation initiative that I think is still ongoing to get eight or ten games localized out of China. And to the west, so I think break down these barriers because I think We have to look at it two different ways. We’re looking at the government, but we’re not again looking at the creative aspects of what can happen.
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We’re simply looking at the the totalitarianism. Right? And so I think there’s like some good faith efforts to try to to evade that and and get to the people that you actually wanna talk to. The the the the you and me in China. As opposed to the the major corporations there.
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Yeah. What
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from your POV, what would the what would the Chinese purchase of an American company that really opened people’s eyes look like or or the Chinese interference in an American company’s product. What what level of interference would there need to be for, like, average Jane and Joe video game player to be, like, oh, this is bad. We have to like, something needs to have here.
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I would assume it would require the acquisition of one of the, what are called, the first parties. So the the the consul manufacturers and really the only one that would be small enough to be purchased in that way is Playstation. So there’s a lot of theorizing that Sony itself could be purchased in this in this cascading effect of mergers and acquisitions. Although Sony’s games revenue is substantially higher than Microsoft. Microsoft, the owner of Xbox is a much bigger company.
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So people have often looked at companies like Apple and have wondered, like, would they be able to purchase the Playstation brand or something like that? So That kind of the arising happens in economic circles, then you’d only need to take it one step further to imagine an entity like Alibaba or ten cent coming in, and these guys have a lot of money in saying, like, well, we want Playstation now. I don’t think that would happen. I don’t think Japanese companies don’t sell, but Japanese companies like Playstation that are headquartered in America and their their businesses are conducted primarily in America. I think that would open people’s eyes to wow, what what does this mean?
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Where is this coming from? What How does this affect the brand with ubiquity over thirty years? I think it requires a shaking like that. Until or if something like that happens, I fear that the the approach of this will be glacial enough where before you know what the new normal happens, it’s like the simmering pot. Right?
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And — Yeah. So I don’t want anything like that to happen. That to happen. I don’t want a major acquisition or a merger and acquisition like that to happen. But I unfortunately think that will be required if we wanna bring this to people’s attention, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
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And so I think we are the frog in the pot. I think that the simmering will happen and happen and happen and happen and before you know, you’ll be like, oh, these guys own forty percent of this and twenty percent of this and ten percent of this and fifty percent of this and it’s very much what’s happening with the Saudi investment fund. Right? And with LiveGolf and — Mhmm. — what they’re doing in a video game too.
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They bought s and k. They own five percent of Capcom. They own five percent of Exxon. So there are other problems too. And that’s that’s kind of the thing we have to keep a multiple balls here, so we don’t want you know, that’s more about sport sports washing, white washing, and all of that.
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But there are multiple bad actors that we need to keep an eye on too, and no one’s keeping an eye on any of them, which is why I think that it’s just going to get worse. Yeah.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, again, this is this is exactly what happened in Hollywood. Everybody put all their pot put all their eggs in the big blockbuster bucket and then it was exceeded to a whole bunch of rules and regulations from China, and then all of a sudden that went poof China was like, oh, actually, we don’t want Marvel movies anymore. We don’t and now all the studios are in huge trouble. They don’t know they don’t know how to make up that revenue.
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Good. Get good. By
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the way, I just wanna say that good. I mean, you you reap what you sow. These were the same people when MGM came back that went through all of the red dawn remake and remove the Chinese flags. Right? Mhmm.
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Good. Mhmm. You know, you know, shit as far as I’m concerned. And I mean that. It’s like, the companies that choose to do business there, deal with the consequences, deal with the repercussions.
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I own a small business, I own two of them, like I said, and we make our small choices to not deal with them. All of our merch is made in America. Right? All of our merch is fair trade. It’s like just make the choices.
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And if you don’t make those choices, deal with the consequences. Don’t feel bad for those companies. Oh, I hate Disney. I I I think they’re awful. You know, it’s like, you know, go away.
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So it’s you’re totally right though. It’s That’s that’s the other side of it though is that, like, why are more people reveling in, like, the, you know, it just goes to show you that people aren’t paying attention either way. Yeah.
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Well, no. I mean, that’s the long and short of it. Nobody cares so long as they get their new Star Wars. Right.
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And they don’t
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by
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the way, they don’t care that, you know, John Boyega was made into a little postage stamp on the Chinese on the Chinese movie poster for the Star Wars movies because There’s a deep strand of anti black racism in China. That also happened. But everyone ignored that. Disney did that. Look at the look at the two posters for Force Awakens, it’s hysterical.
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You know, and it it
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it’s outrageous. So there’s so many different layers to it that people just ignored. No. It
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it is it it’s fast again, this is a this is a a burgeoning topic. I think it’s only gonna get hotter as as we go along and as China and Tencent and other companies. They keep accumulating stuff. I always like to close these interviews, Colin, by asking if there’s anything I should have asked. If there’s anything you think folks should know about China and video games or just video gaming in general, the the state of things.
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What what what do you think folks should know that I did not ask Yeah. I
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mean, I think well, in terms of the state of gaming in general, if we had you because I’m sure you have an I’m sure there are some gamers in your audience, but I know that you probably have different audience that maybe just watch his film, just watch his TV, absorbs music, whatever. My major role my major goal in in the last few years is to try to just open people’s minds for the potential of video games and to see them as more than Mario. Now Mario’s awesome. I mean, I love Mario. That’s still a thing.
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I mean, people still love Mario, but video games are so expansive and so interesting and there’s games for everyone. I I don’t think that people understand that there is a video game for everybody. And games like I think this audience would like games like civilization and those kinds of like really nerdy management in historical games and all of that. So I want people to not walk away from our conversation thinking it’s like, oh, it’s very oh, this owner is totalitarian shadow is cast a poll over the video games industry. It’s it’s quite bright and airy right now and it’s very interesting.
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We are going through a course of mergers and acquisitions where companies are buying each other up and Microsoft just bought Activision Blizzard and Bethesda and are becoming a major gaming force to rival PlayStation. And so a lot of interesting stuff going on in the in the industry I hope people pay attention to. But as far as this stuff is concerned, I really appreciate you ringing the Gong on this to at least your audience. And I hope more people come to see this for what it is, which is just a potential danger that we need to write. And it’s just hard for me to imagine that when Discord or Roblox solicited Chinese investment that they couldn’t find anyone else to give them that money.
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Like, no one else wanted to buy a piece of robots. And that’s what I’m saying. We need to hold people’s feet to the fire to make the right decision. So that when it trickles down to us, we don’t even have to have these conversations. But it’s about the almighty dollar and that is it.
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And so like you said earlier, when they don’t know how to make the revenue, they’re Met Revenue Connect and all that? Good. You know, I hope that I hope people make learn some lessons about this. Well, let me ask. I mean,
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I
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am a
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I am always skeptical. I I dislike boycotts as a matter of course. It’s not my it’s not my preferred form of activism. But do you think we are getting to a point where some there needs to be some sort of organization of economic distress on these companies that that take Chinese money? Or is are we still Or would people even care?
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I mean, is it is it would it just be ineffective? It probably would be ineffective. I
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mean, you’re asking me I mean, the the real political answer to me is that China should be under an economic embargo because of COVID. That’s that’s nothing to do with with anything else. Like, it’s like we should so we won’t even we won’t even deal with them in ways that are material. Right? That ruin the entire world basically for two years, and they got away with that.
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So, of course, they’re gonna get away with with infiltrating entertainment? Because it it almost seems to me, like, they get away with it because it’s like to your point, who cares? Who gives a shit? I have things to worry about. Inflation’s going crazy.
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I just put a hundred dollars on my my gas tank. Gotta go to the kids game tonight. I don’t care about any of this. This is seems so trivial and in a way it is. But I think things that are important start out often as trivialities.
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And the cascading effect of unintended consequences can bring us to a darker place. And So I just it’s it’s not about boycotting. It’s just about bringing attention to it so that we can speak with our wallets in an effective way as a pattern. To encourage these corporations to act more ethically. And I think there is an unethical edge to going and working for a Chinese company, which is why I brought up Sean Layton, the PlayStation CEO, before I reached out to him, the ex CEO.
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I reached out to him and I’m to see if he wants to be on the do a show with me. I’m sure he won’t, but he has a lot of questions to answer. Because it’s what I brought
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up
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earlier. Right? Sean Layton was the PlayStation CEO. So you have to go work for Tencent. You don’t have any other options?
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The money is worth it that much to you. And you’re gonna help normalize them. And that’s the cascading effect of — No. — of drama that I think will continue. So please keep speaking to your audience about it.
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I’m very appreciative that you wrote about it because I really feel like you were the one of the first people I saw ever acknowledge it in the political sphere and that’s why I reached out to you to thank you for that.
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No. Colin, thank you for being on the show. I’ll get you back on here in three years when I finished God of War Rags around. It’s coming out in a couple of months. Yes.
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So no. But I this is a great chat, and I I really do think folks should be paying attention to it. So Thank you. My name is Sunny Bunch. I am the culture editor at The Bulwark.
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We will be back next week with another episode of The Bulwark House of Hollywood.
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Get an inside look at Hollywood with Michael Rosenbaum. Let’s get inside Deborah Ann Wall. If you had to choose between True Blood, DARE Double, to do again. Partially because the Marvel
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series feel unfinished to me because we got canceled when we thought we were gonna have more. We’re true blood. We did get to wrap it up. I knew that we were wrapping it up. I could say goodbye to everyone.
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I stole something from a set. I know I didn’t get a steal anything from our daredevil set. Inside of you with
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Michael Rosenbaum, wherever you listen.
