This is a great video, specially the first two thirds, a very good historical introduction specialy for beginners or for people to re-learn this stuff. Also the ending part(on Japan shit) is crazy good.
However I must criticize the last third with regards to ACG and China. He is correct in many ways, Tencent’s reach is impressive but I think he severely oversells the Mihoyo success story as an example of Chinese success at ACG for global soft power, he overlooks some important details.
1- On the competence of this Chinese soft power play he doesn’t acknowledge that we know Tencent had an opportunity to buy Mihoyo which Mihoyo intelligently refused. If Tencent had bought Mihoyo there wouldn’t even be a Genshin or at best it is pretty well accepted Genshin would have crashed and burned at some point. You only need to look at the average Tencent mobile game to realize this, there are parodies of this on Bilibili.
It is also a consensus COVID was a huge part in Genshin’s success in the west. It is silly not to mention this at all. The Chinese dominance would have happened eventually he is correct, but not as soon as it did without it.
2- Another example the western world and global south are in general far more inclined towards F2P and low spending games. In constrast, the Chinese mobile audience consists of “new wealth” i.e a Gen Z-Millenials with good jobs and disposable incomes who would rather spend thousands on digital commodities than traditional wealth e.g a house, sports cars, jewelry. The Chinese mobile industry(like the Japanese gachas) is directed at this “young-middle age salaryman” level of wealth.
Meanwhile westerners are definitely not “new wealth”, its clear global capitalist wealth is extremely concentrated on boomers who obviously don’t care about digital goods. Therefore despite the massive reach of Genshin and others they’re still at the mercy of other games that are more F2P friendly.
When he mentions the history of anime it is important to remember that the several “booms”, the most significant one in the 80-90s also coincided with Japanese “new wealth”. The Japanese salary man sterotype isn’t just someone who is alienated but also someone with a good job and disposable income. It feels weird not to mention the CPC’s initiative towards ACG culture have a lot more to do with the economics of this new “wealthy” urban working class and not just cultural soft power.
We have very good estimates that the vast majority of these Chinese anime games make most of their money in China and Japan, not in the west, e.g Genshin makes more than half of its revenue in China-Japan..
I am very wary of trying to look at Chinese ACG as some CPC soft power grand strategy based on the examples he gave. China is investing into ACG because these game companies provide thousands of well paying IT jobs in Shanghai. I’d put that as the first reason rather than some grand soft power strategy.
Just look at their expansion plans… miHoYo plans to build “Shanghai Akihabara” as part of new headquarters expansion
The new bought building occupies an area of 148,000 square meters, while the other covers 80,000 square meters. The miHoYo’s domestic workforce could potentially reach up to 10,000 employees in the future, the GameLook report suggested.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
