There is no question over the last 10 years the quality and production level of Chinese developed games has seem to sky rocket. Many of these games even being free to play. But honestly I haven’t played a single one. For the same reasons I refused to download TikTok.
China is a well known surveillance state. I worry downloading and playing these games especially on a PC or mobile phone would just be a huge privacy risk.
Am I being to paranoid ? Are there some regulations I’m not aware of that might protect me anyway ?
I feel like I’m missing out on some really high quality visually striking games because of it
I think this is true for all games that access the internet. However, it seems an especially large number of Chinese games that make it to the West require an internet connection to function. Sometimes it makes sense (multiplayer mechanics, gacha, etc.), sometimes it doesn’t at all (some relatively popular single-player RPGs with no online play require a connection just to make a save file, for example).
This is just to say I understand people being concerned if all they see are these Chinese online-required games everywhere when they can also find some random completely offline game made in America, Europe, Japan, etc. just as easily (or even a game with an optional online mode that can be disabled without the game breaking).
Western games do this tol, though, even where it doesn’t make sense to. It isn’t a China specific thing, and China has less of an ability to do anything malicious with that data than your local governments and corpos.