How China Is Playing Catchup With International Companies

I live in Singapore, which is about 2,800 miles (4,500 km) from China. Yet, many of us still use Baidu. No, not for searching the web. Instead, practically every pirate is using it to find pirated chinese songs with Baidu. A search engine famous for piracy? If it was in the west, I think the owners would have been sued to death by now.

As much as anyone can deny it, China is playing catchup with the newest programs out in the world. And the slightly weaker websites/programs still survive because of the sheer amount of people. Foreign websites may blocked in an moment’s notice, and the domestic duplicates won’t. Thus, creating an situation where people are using the backwater sites/programs. With the amount of traffic and foreign (often good) ideas out of the picture, this websites and programs don’t really advance.

Take World of Warcraft (WoW) for an example. Blizzard earns billions per year just from this single MMORPG. The most popular game ever is the golden standard in MMORPGS. Of course, it is hurting local MMORPGS in China. What did the government do? They made Blizzard jump through a bunch of hoops. Make life hard for them. With restrictions in place, 11.5 million users’ revenue turns into just 6% of Warcraft’s total revenues.

But the local game development scene still ain’t winning over the foreign games! Well, they banned WoW back in August ’09 for “gross violation” of Chinese regulations . The game was allowed to be relaunched after 2 months with edits to the game. S what do the edits include? Turning the blood’s colour from red to black and turning piles of bones into sandbags.

Then, they banned foreign investment in the entire online game industry “in any form”.

Games made in China are usually bad when placed next to a mediocre western game. However, the games still thrive in China, partly because the competition has been removed.

They have been trying to break into the Singaporean market for years (as we are in asia, also relatively rich); and surprisingly, they fall dead very quickly in view of foreign games like WoW and Maplestory.

It has been the same with other fields. Google is just one of them. The restrictions may scare foreign companies away — unless you have the resources to make your product applicable. While the rest of the world advances, China just stays there, in their sterile environment.

It’s simple, really. If they can compete with the foreign products, they do have the resources to win.

And China-based development teams? Don’t copy and paste foreign programs. Please?

Sources: