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How The Biggest Chinese Game Content Creator Lost 270,000 Subscribers In a Day

1K View2022-11-29

One of China's most famous game content creators, Ao Changzhang, has once again been put on the spot.

With a total of 7 million subs, Ao's subscribers plummeted by 580,000 in less than a week, and his official fan group in China's largest gaming community, Tieba, has also announced that it would no longer have any relationship with Ao. Ao's name tag even briefly surpassed the World Cup news last Friday, trending very high on the Chinese social media Weibo.

Ao trended first on Weibo, even exceeding the match between Uruguay and Korea.

The mess started with a terrible ad endorsement from Ao. On November 24th, Ao posted a new video on BiliBili named "The bitterness behind a wallpaper software trapped in the gray area ".

In the video, Ao reveals that a large number of Chinese gamers are currently using Wallpaper Engine, the wallpaper software known as “little red car”, as a large cloud drive for storing porn and Hentai.

What Ao said is true, and it was an unspoken secret that some Chinese gamers used the Wallpaper Engine available on Steam to get videos they can’t access through the internet because of the ‘great firewall’ set up by the Chinese government to block foreign websites.

In fact, it isn’t just Wallpaper Engine; the international versions of Steam and Epic themselves also lie in the gray area of Chinese publishing law.

The stores could be blocked by the great firewall at any time for containing a large number of games that have not been vetted by Chinese publications, while Ao’s video might have greatly accelerated this with his over 7 million subscribers.

After revealing and criticizing the current state of Wallpaper Engine, Ao turned around and endorsed Fotor: Lazy Design, a wallpaper software developed by a Chinese company whose functions are almost identical to Wallpaper Engine.

The App has received mostly negative reviews since the video released

Players were incredibly shocked to find that Ao, who has always branded himself as a veteran gamer, would make such a destructive move for Chinese gaming communities just because of an advertising endorsement.

Within an hour of the video's release, enormous numbers of angry players began reporting the video and accusing Ao of selfish behavior.

“The fact that you dragged this iceberg out of the water is annoying enough, and the reason behind it just made me sick.” one of Ao’s fans commented.

A famous comic artist in China also left his thoughts

Although the video was quickly removed by Ao, the butterfly effect had already begun.

On the evening of the 24th, many Wallpaper Engine users found that their video collections were gone, mostly deleted by uploaders afraid of being discovered by the Chinese government regulators whose scrutiny might be drawn by the incident.

Players who found their videos deleted became even angrier, and the whole incident began to spread through player communities.

By the morning of the 25th, Ao had lost 270,000 subscribers in just a day, and angry players took over the comment sections for all his videos. It didn't even take Ao a day to go from a veteran gamer who loves old games to a destroyer of Chinese gaming communities.

There are even livestreams to record Ao’s unsubscribing fans.

This is actually not the first time that Ao has been criticized for his advertising endorsements. Ao once accepted an endorsement deal for the game Monkey King: Hero is Back in 2019 and raved about everything in the game before its release, giving it a high score, close to perfect.

However, after the game was released, players found that its gameplay was very rough, and the game’s detail also seemed shoddy. As an action game, Monkey King's combat system is extremely monotonous, which is very different from what Ao said in the video.

The game only received a 61 on Metacritic

After being questioned by the players, Ao deleted the video and returned all the endorsement fees and assured players that he would carefully check the contents of videos in the future.

By now, Ao's new video has disappeared from all Chinese video sites, and ironically, the only place to find this controversial video is on the Wallpaper Engine Ao criticized.

It is quite obvious that Ao didn’t keep his promise, and forgiveness from fans and players is unlikely anytime soon.

SIE Shanghai President Tatsuo Eguchi Said China Is One of Their Most Important Emerging Market

Reon Zhang Recently, China’s Annual Game Industry Conference of 2021 was held. Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Shanghai President Tatsuo Eguchi was interviewed at this conference, presenting his perspective to China’s gaming industry. During the interview, Tatsuo Eguchi said he has confidence in the future of China’s gaming industry. Not only because of the vast population base and the growing number of talented developers but also because more and more Chinese developers have begun to realize the opportunity in console games, releasing high-quality games to the global markets, such as Genshin Impact. In the interview, Tatsuo Eguchi said they hoped that the PS5 console could achieve twice the sales of the PS4 in the Chinese market.

Superpixel2K2021-12-24