Just saw a YouTube video called "Western games are doomed..."
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Just saw a YouTube video called “Western games are doomed…”
The premise? Asian devs are taking over and crushing AAA.
Now, I don’t disagree that Asian PC games are amazing. They’ve always been great. We in the West just never paid attention. I’ve got a hard drive stuffed with Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean games from the ’90s and ’00s. Just today, I fired up Anemone—a killer Korean platformer that never left Windows.
But “Western games are doomed”? That ignores the torrent of brilliant AA and indie titles constantly dropping. The past few years have been insanely innovative—even on weird little platforms like Playdate or TIC‑80.
Talk to devs, they’ll tell you the same thing: AA and indie is where the wild ideas live. AAA can’t take risks—it’s too expensive, too corporate, too afraid.
Most games today are made by small teams taking imaginative risks. You don’t hear about them because they don’t have a marketing budget. But they’re there, and they’re doing the real work of keeping games alive.
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Just saw a YouTube video called “Western games are doomed…”
The premise? Asian devs are taking over and crushing AAA.
Now, I don’t disagree that Asian PC games are amazing. They’ve always been great. We in the West just never paid attention. I’ve got a hard drive stuffed with Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean games from the ’90s and ’00s. Just today, I fired up Anemone—a killer Korean platformer that never left Windows.
But “Western games are doomed”? That ignores the torrent of brilliant AA and indie titles constantly dropping. The past few years have been insanely innovative—even on weird little platforms like Playdate or TIC‑80.
Talk to devs, they’ll tell you the same thing: AA and indie is where the wild ideas live. AAA can’t take risks—it’s too expensive, too corporate, too afraid.
Most games today are made by small teams taking imaginative risks. You don’t hear about them because they don’t have a marketing budget. But they’re there, and they’re doing the real work of keeping games alive.
@atomicpoet everything is "doomed" these days. It's tiring that change is constantly framed as the end of something, and within a context of conflict. But I guess that's how to get views.
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@atomicpoet everything is "doomed" these days. It's tiring that change is constantly framed as the end of something, and within a context of conflict. But I guess that's how to get views.
@pellechristensen Absolutely true. We should be celebrating that video games are becoming more international and diverse.
And it’s not as though these Asian PC games come out of a vacuum. The critical acclaim is the result of decades of work.
One of my favourite stories to talk about is Super Fighter—a Taiwanese fighting game that I received via floppy, no localization. It came to me at a time when I was very bitter about the PC port of Street Fighter II, published by U.S. Gold. Terrible in every sense. Playing Super Fighter, it felt so good to play something built well for PC.
And this was in the 90s.
