#2: How China is Modifying PUBG, the Most Popular Game in the World
This is issue #2 of the Magpie Digest newsletter, originally sent on 11/23/2017
Do you know how to say “winner winner, chicken dinner” in Chinese? Thanks to the multiplayer game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the answer now blankets the Chinese internet: 大吉大利，今晚吃鸡 (“Luck be with you, tonight we’re eating chicken.”)
PUBG is a battle royale game (大逃杀, roughly “avoid being killed”) where 100 players are parachuted onto an island and must fight each other to be the last one standing, Hunger Games style. Since its beta release on the Steam gaming platform in March of this year, it has shattered records and become the most popular game in the world. An estimated 49% of the game’s 18 million players live in China, where it has propelled the adoption of Steam and inspired a whole slew of similar games now collectively referred to as 吃鸡游戏 (“chicken eating games”). Today, we are going to take a look at two stories around China’s chicken eating community: the cottage industry of hack developers, and the genre’s attempts to appease censors.
The Cottage Industry of Videogame Hacking
On Nov. 13th, PUBG’s third-party moderation team BattlEye reported banning almost 100,000 players in a single weekend for cheating, mostly from China. While China is not the only country where players 开外挂 (use unauthorized game plug-ins), the domestic game hacking industry does stand out for its sophistication. If you know where to look, you can purchase hacks ranging from simple keyboard and mouse scripts that increase in-game efficiency to bizarre mods that transcend into the realm of art, as with the Luffy hack above.
Developing hacks is a lucrative black market business. In a curiosity voyage around the prevalence and cost of these hacks, Sohu user 高玩癌 discovered that there are two pricing models: pedestrian hacks range from 40–100 RMB (USD $6–15)/day, while the higher quality stuff, including setups that pipe out a non-visibly hacked display for livestreamers, is only available as monthly subscriptions from 4,500–6,000 RMB (USD $680-$900/month). Even at the lower end of the spectrum, that is an iPhone X at inflated Chinese prices every two months!
In a Zhihu thread (with over 1 million views!) asking “why Chinese-made hacks are so powerful,” users wrote that many of these developers have been in the business for years, applying their technical skills from game to game as new ones gain momentum:
“The majority of today’s domestic hack developers today are veterans who have fought against everything [Tencent’s TenProtect anti-cheating department, regarded in China as the toughest anti-cheating initiative] threw at them for years. Some actually work for antivirus companies by day.”
“There was a game called DNF (Dungeon Fighter Online, released in China in 2007) which Tencent was forced to update every week just to deal with hackers. But the hack developers would come online with new hacks just two days later.”
Like super bacteria evolving an immunity to antibiotics, the hackers that could overcome the intensive anti-cheating efforts for previous games like DNF, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive were simply the only ones left by the time PUBG came along:
“Compared to other countries’ hackers who work in small teams, Chinese hackers have actually developed a highly efficient industry — there are specific groups of people for every step, including researching, developing, testing, and selling the hacks. Whenever a popular game is updated, these developers can guarantee an updated hack is released within six hours.”
While hacks for games like PUBG can be found on Taobao (of course), some hack developers go in-game to hock their wares directly, since it’s the best place to demonstrate them. Many players have reported being approached by people selling hacks inside the game, like this entrepreneurial speedster below:
While people around the world are clamoring for PUBG to become more effective at banning people using hacks, several Chinese Steam commenters had a better idea — maybe everyone using hacks should just get their own server, morphing the game from a survival shooter to a showcase of creative programming. After all, PUBG itself originated from a mod of a mod, and what is the difference between a mod and a hack except official acknowledgement?
Competition with Socialist Characteristics
As PUBG’s star rose, several domestic developers released their own “chicken eaters” that attracted millions of players, especially on mobile platforms where the official game was not available. The most popular one at time of writing (with 6 million daily active users) is NetEase’s 荒野行动 (“Operation: Wilderness”), one of at least two entries by the gaming giant into the genre this year. Tencent announced yesterday that they would become PUBG’s official distribution partner in China — just one day after launching the Android beta of their own mobile chicken eater 光荣使命 (“Glorious Mission”) with 30 million preregistered players.
The only thing that might put a damper on the feeding frenzy is government regulation — as of last year, all mobile games have to be approved by the government before appearing on App Stores. On Oct. 27, the department responsible for overseeing online games released a statement that condemned the game’s survivalist violence as going against “China’s traditional culture and moral principles” and “core socialist values.” While no action has been taken yet to further control PUBG or Steam, this spelled danger for companies trying to publish mobile versions of the game.
To appease the government, many Chinese developers reacted by re-categorizing the games from 大逃杀 (“battle royale”) to 军事演习 (“military exercises”).
Some fabricated convoluted back stories to make this work in their games: in one, players are now competing for the right to defend Earth against invading aliens.
Nobody, however, took it as far as NetEase. In a bid to hold on to their top spot, NetEase changed Operation: Wilderness’s opening animation to explain that the player is training to become a member of a peacekeeping force. More drastically, the same update also draped red propaganda banners, familiar to anyone who has ever spent time in a Chinese city, to the in-game environment. You can almost hear NetEase saying: “How could a game be accused of being against core socialist values, when it is literally promoting core socialist values?” Just the type of hilarious ingenuity you need to be the last game standing among hundreds in this crowded playing field.
Read more:
- BoingBoing — Magpie’s own Christina Xu wrote about the mainstreaming of Chinese gamer slang, including 开挂 (English)
- SupChina — Chinese Gamers Draw Ire For Dominating World’s Most Popular Game (English)
- QZ — Chinese copycats of PUBG added “core socialist values” (English)
- Weibo reposted from GamerSky — Magnets, X-Ray Vision, and Crazy Speed: PUBG’s most shocking hacks (Chinese)
- Miaopai — A PUBG player runs into a truly blood-curdling 巨人挂 (“giant hack”)(Chinese, short video)
- Sohu — How much would it cost to buy every hack in PUBG? (Chinese)
Magpie Digest is a service offered by Magpie Kingdom, a project by Christina Xu, Tricia Wang, and Pheona Chen to help busy people stay attuned to China’s rapidly shifting conversations from abroad.
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