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 don’t disagree that centralization of information gathering is a bigger concern of many fragmented data collectors. Sure the US is a large surveillance state, but it takes a lot of energy and coordination to integrate all these disparate systems. The risk of China is that by having state involvement in all businesses, that integration can happen at all stages of development. But generally I think fighting for data privacy is worth it regardless of company/country.
As for Chinese games, I generally avoid them because they’re gatcha games or heavily astroturfed. I still feel burned from “My Time at Portia”. It had so many positive reviews and was compared to stardew Valley, but the game was janky and felt like a poorly implemented single player mmo.