A new report revealed that the majority of mobile gamers in China are abandoning their consoles altogether. In just one year, almost 3 million games in Chinese game stores have suddenly disappeared. The report found that more than 90% of the games that had previously been available were no longer available.
The only thing is, these games are not disappearing in the states. The vast majority of them have simply gone out of business.
This is just a few of the games that have disappeared from the US and European game stores. But I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a console game that was completely absent from a Chinese game store. Sure, I’ve probably seen a game that was in that store once, but the odds of me seeing it again are close to nil.
This is because consoles are very much a part of life in China. People go into the big stores to buy their games, and when they come out they are gone.
It’s because of the fact that many games, even those that are on other platforms, are made with limited local resources in mind. Not every console game that comes out is going to be a blockbuster.
Its the same reason that movies are so expensive in the States. As I said earlier, the Chinese go into the big stores to buy their games, and when they come out they are usually gone.
I still haven’t seen a single game of any kind that is made in China. The only Chinese game I have seen is the Super Mario Bros. game that came out in Japan on the NES. I guess its been a while since I’ve seen one of these games.
Its a shame because it is a pretty amazing game and the series is very popular in Japan, and most of the other games in the series are very good too. But even though my Japanese is limited to the 3 letter word “hikari”, I still have this feeling that I’m missing something. Its like Ive been living in a foreign country and Ive never seen any of its popular games.
Super Mario Bros. is an amazing game in its own right, but you can tell it is an imported game because it is only made in Japan. And that is a very important point because, unless you are a native of Japan, most console games are not made in Japan. Most consoles are made in other countries. That means almost all of them are likely to be imported games, and it is this import that is making many of the Japanese consoles so popular right now.
Well, that’s the theory anyway. In the real world, most of the games produced by other companies are imported. Although, as we have seen, the Japanese games are not all made in Japan. In fact, many are made by Japanese companies outside of Japan. But that’s a whole different issue.
