Recently, a video about a Chinese indie game pirated before its launch on Steam went viral on BiliBili. One month before its Steam launch date, its one-man developer Wanzi found a game's download link on a suspicious-looking website. Many other developers shared similar experiences in the comment section.
In the past, major Chinese pirate websites had this unspoken rule not to promote pirate downloads of Chinese games to show their support and avoid any severe legal accountability. At first, we thought this was a case of websites violating this trust and shamelessly exploiting indie devs, but after further investigation, this seems to be a very different case than we expected.
There are many cases of websites stealing information instead of actual game content; because of the consistency of the Chinese text and the lack of relevant copyright laws in China, it is almost impossible to stop websites that rely on clickbait to gain traffic for profit. Any keyword will result in many similar crawler websites appearing in search engines. After clicking into them, they are all the same copied information and screenshots from Steam and blank links without any actual content. Although such a piracy incident is not what we expected initially, those clickbait websites are undoubtedly infringing game developers’ copyright.
To learn more about the current state of Chinese pirated indie games, we contacted WanZi, the game developer himself. We had a chat about the situation, this weird pirating practice, the game, and his life of being a one-man team indie developer in China.
Below is the full interview with WanZi:
Q: Where did the inspiration for Panacele: Back to Wild come from?
A: In fact, the idea of the game itself comes from card games like Hearthstone and Slay The Spire. I was fascinated by these interesting card designs and thought I could develop such a game in the future.
For the design of the plot, I usually like to read science fiction novels, many of them talk about the Earth being destroyed by pollution because of human over-exploitation, but I think that humans are only a small passerby of the Earth, the Earth's environmental carrying capacity is very strong, it will not be destroyed by just human pollution. So I designed an apocalyptic science fiction world where humans were driven down from the top of the food chain.
Q: How do you feel about the game being pirated and posted on the Internet?
A: TBH, I was quite happy because it means my game got more attention. In fact, a long time ago, I was afraid of developing indie games because I was afraid of piracy. I once added a group chat and found that one developer doesn’t even earn as much as those websites that pirated his games. But after communication with many other developers, we all think that nothing can really stop us from creating what we really love, even piracy.
Q: You are not the first producer whose game has been pirated and information stolen. What do you think we can do to improve the overall environment of the game market?
A: I think this is really difficult, this is an industry linked to human nature and interests, perhaps national policies and legislation will be more sound in the future, at least to make the environment better. It is impossible to expect pirate sites and platforms to exit the market on their own. I think maybe it will slowly get better in the future, but I have no confidence in how fast it will be.
Q: The game participated in Steam's Indie Games Festival and released a demo. What is the latest progress? Do you have any specific feelings about the game's participation?
A: I learned a lot, and more importantly, I think I found a balance between the graphics and mechanics of the game. I saw a lot of games with simple graphics but very interesting mechanics, and that's where I'll be going from here. Because for indie developers, art is sometimes a burden, I’m not very professional, and some of my decisions can easily affect the rest of the production later.
Q: During these two years of development, do you feel that the general environment of the Chinese indie game market has changed? How?
A: It definitely has changed, and I think it has gotten worse. Although a few great indie games have come out in the past few years, the indie game market in China has attracted a lot of people who want to profit from it into entering, and now the market is monopolized by these top manufacturers for promotion and development, and most of these manufacturers' indie games are shoddy, just like they did in the mobile game market before. As a result, independent developers like us sometimes don't get a better chance to let other players play our games instead. For players, the current environment of Chinese games is information fragmentation. Most players are mobile game players. It is difficult for them to experience a game that may cause days or even more to finish.
Q: Is there anything you want to share with players and other indie game developers?
A: For players, I really appreciate you for supporting Panacele: Back to Wild. The game will soon publish an EA version on Steam. I couldn’t make it this far without your support. I hope the game will offer you a great experience. For developers, I know it’s hard and quite far for us to talk about changing the overall environment of the Chinese game market, but please hope and wait until the day we can make Chinese indie games better, keep on keeping on.
Panacele: Back to the Wild is an indie card game developed by one person. The game not only combines the best of war chess, roguelike, and building deck, but also has its original tactical position game mechanic with a series of characters and cards as the core. In the game, you will play as a commander and free to build your own squad and help human restore their civilization. The game is about to launch its EA version on Steam on March 11th