That's a pretty sick market to be in. When the entire culture won't decide that anything is worth paying for, the only way to make make money on them is to wring it out of them, or turn them into the product, for advertisers.I wish I had to courage to say it like it is. It is not that I vehemently dislike Chinese games, it's that I despise their business model, which specifically requires that you build skinner box gambling mechanics to get players and their friends utterly addicted to your game, then you can upsell gambling tokens (microtransactions) as well as sell the information of your playerbase to advertisers.
This is the commercialism which I despise. Not the fact that you have to pay for games which pirates dislike. See pirates? If everyone were to follow the Chinese online PVP MMO model, you will get the exact same types of games, all trying to elbow each other in trying to grab an audience and getting them addicted. Western social games are headed in that direction, as long as they follow the philosophy of designing gameplay around monetization. If every game maker is only concerned about return on investment, then they will all adopt the skinner box, carrot and stick, nickel and dime mechanics that are popular all over Asia. That is the future if every game company decided to build their business model on guaranteed profit. And that is a very sick, sick future.
As a gamer, I don't want to be treated as a commodity. That is why I only play Western and Japanese PC and console games. Let's celebrate games that respect the player, that understand that they are meant to give a meaningful experience to adults that don't have all the time in the world; games that can coexist with other games as works of art, instead of trying to outdo them in popularity. The creators of some of these games can't get by using off-the-shelf free assets. There is a place for freeware. But there is also a place for commercialware with unique content.
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