Is China's ever-growing influence about to extend into the games industry? GamesTM finds out

“LET HER SLEEP,” proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte, as the greedy eyes of his aides wandered across the map toward China, “for when she wakes she will shake the world.” A short man, perhaps, and one with an unsociably intense love for naval battles, but Napoleon was clearly onto something. With a population of 1.3 billion and an economy growing at the rate of 9 per cent each year, the new People’s Republic of China has the ambition and resources to be a major threat in any industry it touches.

As the 21st Century begins to take shape, America may well begin to question the wisdom of its bloated crusade to eradicate communism from the face of the Earth. With its restrictive politics limiting financial growth in place, China was, in the words of CNN’s Joe Havely, little more than, “An inwardlooking, communist basket case.” Without it, the world’s most populous country has only just begun to embrace capitalism, and it has the sort of workforce and natural resources to outbid any country in the West. Our incessant bickering over which company will win the next generation’s three-ring crapshoot may one day seem hopelessly naive. The balance of power for the entire planet is shifting, and videogames are in the thick of it.

“I was offered the chance to go to Korea with Howard Marks, an old friend of mine who used to run Activision. He told me it was just going nuts over there,” recalls Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry, who has been investigating the potential of the Asian industry for several years. “We met up with a lot of different companies and you could just feel the energy, you know? These weren’t people just fooling around. We bought a game over – a free-to-play Korean title – just to see what reaction it would get in the US and we had 100,000 people sign up as soon as we said we had it. Now we have 6 million. It was very interesting, so we went to China and had the exact same response from Chinese developers. The companies are huge and dying to get into the US. Everything is hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of players.”

China is the lynchpin of the Asian economic miracle. A country whose turbulent recent history has opened up reservoirs of capitalist potential that many assumed – or perhaps hoped – would never be fulfilled. With India’s aggressive push into international business, analysts are predicting a near future where the life of the marketplace is increasingly governed by the tastes of the population of just two countries. One thing is certain – the desire is there. “Mentally, China is one of the most entrepreneurial and capitalist places on Earth right now,” explains Frank Yu, author of Gamasutra.com’s regular column, The China Angle. “Although the technology and shiny buildings may only be in the top cities of China, everyone is forming businesses, buying property, selling products, and trading, even in the less developed parts of the country.”

CHINA IS IN a similar position to that of Japan in the Fifties and Sixties. The repression of knowledge, culture, and free-market business is slowly lifting, and the void is being filled with an explosion of ideas and passion. The Japanese videogame industry was driven to success by the will of its people to escape from the past by embracing progress. China may be about to enter a period of similarly rapid growth, and companies from the US and Europe want to be on the ground floor this time.

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