PlayStation's China Hero Project Aims to Create Relationships Like Final Fantasy and Sony

Sony has placed its China Hero Project front and center at Chinajoy, and its leader provides some interesting insight about it.

[Einhander1972]

TLDR: China Hero Project is 21 games 14 are still in development. And PS5 is seeing big sales gains over PS4.

And the Final Fantasy quote is about them wanting to have a long term relationships with Chinese developers like they have with Square Enix who has been putting games on PlayStation for 20 years.

Bao Bo:
　CHP has been in existence for seven years, and has announced a total of 21 selected titles.
　Seven of these titles have been released, and 14 titles, including the multiplayer open world ARPG "Unending Dawn" , the single-player adventure "Loulan" , and the martial arts action RPG "Brocade-Clad Guard" announced at CJ2024, are currently in development by the supported developers. We are currently in the final stages of developing these third-term selected titles.

Bao Bo:
　I think it has been quite successful. That's because the changes in the Chinese game market in recent years have been a big tailwind. To be
　honest, during the first and second phases of CHP titles, consumer game consoles were hardly popular in China. However, recently, the PlayStation platform has rapidly penetrated the market, and the number of people playing has increased dramatically, and Chinese gamers have naturally been able to touch it.

4Gamer:
　Which is stronger in China, PS5 or PS4?

Bao Bo:
　I don't know the exact market share, but as far as I know, PS5 is overwhelming. This is because, as I just said, during the PS4 era, consumer game consoles had not yet taken root in China, whereas in recent years, it has become the norm for new people to start with PS5.

[Rynxie]

Chinese games are heavily censored and influenced by the CCP. Keep that garbage in China.

[XiNatsuDragnel]

Good goals

[Profchaos]

If sony want the Chinese market they will have to sell their soul and creative freedom to get it 9/10 games they produce would not stand up to scrutiny for release

[GrimyShoot9r]

The Chinese market is so big they would be willing to develop and fund games that only get released in China. To release a game in China developers hafto follow very strict guidelines and those types of game wouldn't work in other markets around the world and Sony would know that

[TricksterArrow]

People need to make up their minds. They just bastioned that Wukong Chinese game coming up was a "spit in the face to censorship and woke culture", but now I start to see posts like this, that Chinese games are full of censorship and lack of freedom.

[Profchaos]

Simple answer is look at the movie industry there's no perfect side here.

There's overly progressive themes and design in pretty much all western developed titles especially where SBI gets involved. Anyone else notice that games with a strong female protagonist lead are becoming oversaturated and clearly pandering to a audience that doesn't even buy games then flopping and studio's blaming the games model or sexist gamers for not buying it.

Then look at movies like iron man 3 and dr Strange the main villain in both was race swapped from a Asian to a British or Celtic from memory actors to pass china censorship.

Wwz had any mention of china stripped to pass censorship.

Pirates of the Caribbean had a character created specifically for the market but the Chinese gov ended up calling it racist and stripping it out.

The movie red dawn had its Chinese antagonists changed to north Korean to pass

Skyfall had to remove scenes where Chinese people were in fight scenes

The list goes on

There's a zero tolerance on nudity so many movies strip this out and in the gaming space threw times where nudity is used to convey story in intimate scenes between characters like a movie and this is in Sony first party these will go.

Now the overly progressive stuff gets to me to its assanine and done out of obligation rather than good storytelling but the Chinese censorship is a bridge to far and when games differ drastically from movies in many ways instead of changing some key art modern games will just not add it in then first place.

Either way it does not give the storyteller or developer true creative control in both context they are forced to do something that may not align with the creative vision.

[Rynxie]

Wukong is censored and there's other controversies involving that game.

[blackblades]

They choose the games that had most enjoyment to give support to. Most was souls like apparently. People should read the interview its good. Sony going in on China was good move hell Korea and India as well. Even if the games fail its a starting point.

[Einhander1972]

One of the major benefits for Sony is that if the EU and US courts are going to let Microsoft bully and buy their way to market dominance at least in China Microsoft won't be able to buy the developers and publishers just to cripple PlayStation and dismantle their partnerships.

[Demetrius]

Watch half of the list be souls like. That really has to stop for a while most soulslike end up forgotten. There are folks I had convos with and would ask about games certain soulslikes but they'd be like what's that? Then we'd be like what happen to creativity in gaming nowadays, there used to be hella variety. I'm tired of everybody tryna be like soulsgames, call of duty, fortnite and online only crap.

[Charlieboy333]

Of course you will get the usual xbox fanatics that will completely overlook or forget about this. Then comes the day that Sony's initiative and efforts to support this project will result in some more banger exclusive games for Playstation. You can bet your ass that this will trigger the usual ignorant outcry from xbox worshippers stating "Sony is paying to keep games off xbox!" or "Sony is being anti consumer for not sharing! Blah blah fucking blah.