Maybe because an anime game will mostly attract an Asian audience?
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More likely that it's about different markets. Japan's indie market has not had the same kind of exposure that American indies, and, perhaps, as Icey may illustrate, Chinese indies can thrive on. My Chinese is not very good so it would consume a lot of time for me to research the history of Icey and trace its path towards commercial success, but I suspect it likely has a big following in Chinese online communities the way that games like Undertale does in English speaking communities.
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Do you often see chinese games that are original IP?
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Because:
Localized buzz. Indies tend to spread via word of mouth -- Icey probably went viral in Chinese online communities the way that games like Stardew Valley or Undertale did in English speaking communities. Those two games, BTW, are probably much less known in China.
China is a big country. It's population is more than 4x the size of the USA. That's a huge market that is still growing as the Chinese middle class continues to rise and gives more and more expendable income to more and more people.
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Some good points here, although the population thing is debatable. There are far more American users than Chinese ones on Steam - or at least far more who display their country on their profiles (or not; I'm not sure how Steamspy gets that data).
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Certainly, Chinese representation on Steam has only barely scratched the surface. And I think that's why we see 60k reviews for Undertale and 10k reviews for Icey.
But imagine if Steam had a bigger presence in China? Or if a Chinese company made a Steam-like platform better catered to the Chinese market?
Currently Steam representation of the Chinese PC gaming market is really just the tippy top of the potentially enormous iceberg that lies below. The Chinese government actively suppressed the video game industry prior to 2015, but since they lifted the console ban in 2015 the Chinese video game market has been growing like crazy! As the industry matures, I think there is potential there for games to be more profitable in China than even in the USA... similar to how nowadays even some American-made films make more money in China than they do in the USA. Warcraft is an apt example, and a video-game driven one at that.
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Well, apart from the obvious that it's a Chinese game (as you've mentioned), I guess the game could be pretty popular there? Or the developers gave a huge amount of keys to users to review positively. Wouldn't be the first time it happened.
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Marketing, I think. I will tell you something interesting.
This game created by Chinese and was hacked by a Chinese website(GamerSky.com), just after this website interviewed the creater. (That's incredible, right?)
The creater send this event on Weibo (Like Twitter), then reprinted by other socialmedias and other websites, suddenly everyone knows this game.
Independent games industry just started in China, everyone focus on it. There's a interesting rule, you can hacked whatevery you want, except games created by Chinese.
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The incident mentioned above is a big factor and gives the game a lot of publicity over here.
Prizing also helps, the game for a long time is featured in the under 40RMB section of Steam front page, which probably means a lot of exposure, if it is prized higher it probably would lose lots of exposure.
Lastly the game seems to be well made enough, which doesn't seem to happen frequently enough yet as local indie scene is only taking baby steps, so lots of people are willing to write something positive
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other than that it's Chinese, not some cheap knock-off F2P skinner box targetting the mobile gaming market, and not filled to the brim with blatant copyright violations. Which is extremely rare for video games.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Also, succesfull marketing
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