Whether we are talking about Japan, China or Korea, Asia is an increasingly flourishing land whose productions are beginning to enter the inner circle of manufacturers. We have seen it again in recent months with the hard-hitting Stellar Blade, of which Sony Interactive Entertainment has made itself the publisher, or Lies of P, non-exclusive souls-like but now associated with Game Pass because strongly promoted by Microsoft during gamescom. In the case of China, the phenomenal success of Genshin Impact has acted as an electroshock at Microsoft, according to sources at Retors.
Two years after its global release, it’s unclear how much money the action-RPG has generated on PlayStation and PC, but Sensor Tower’s estimates make it one of the fastest-grossing mobile games in history. of $4 billion. Enough to motivate the competition to dig a little more seriously into the question of Chinese video games.
According to two sources of Retors, Microsoft regrets having missed out on the Genshin Impact phenomenon despite having spoken with HoYoverse at the start of the game’s development. Subsequently, Xbox therefore set up a team in charge of spotting promising Chinese games. Not only at big brands like Tencent, with whom the American has partnered to release Age of Empires Mobile in China, but also the independent studios that Microsoft is courting by offering them large sums of money.
A representative of a Chinese studio, which signed an agreement with Microsoft three years ago for its game to join Game Pass, testifies that the American giant made him a much larger offer to do the same with the sequel to his game. “We haven’t signed yet because we think we’ll get an even better offer when we’re really done playing“, says the representative.
Same story at Recreate Games, a Shanghai studio that signed with Microsoft to launch its Party Animals on PC and Xbox before other platforms and whose CEO Luo Zixiong confirms that Xbox has contacted many Chinese studios working on games for consoles. and pc.
The battle for Chinese games has already caused a turnaround in the case of NetEase’s Naraka: Bladepoint. Very big success on PC with more than 10 million copies sold last June, the Asian battle royale was first shown on PlayStation 5 to finally resurface on Xbox Series as a Game Pass game. Microsoft has therefore taken care to get ahead of its rival to obtain the favors of NetEase, which seems to have put aside the PS5 port until further notice.