There are two "craft" in China and they are in a similar situation.

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Both "craft" have been pirated by many people in china, many of whom use their lan to play games online, but have never paid any money to the game company.

Both "craft" have strong mod communities, so much so as to give this game a second decade of life.

Both "craft" are represented by NetEase and commercialize the MOD community project and violate the open source agreement.
(MOD project's open source agreement may not be legally recognized, but commercial plundering of it may at least violate tacit understanding, ethics and tradition.)

Both "craft" belong to Microsoft now.

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NetEase has the monopoly power to commercialize MOD for these two "craft" in China. Volunteering MOD communities in China are shrinking and dying due to commercialization. But as long as the MOD community in other parts of the world is open and volunteering, NetEase can gain a steady stream of commercial benefits.

Due to the issue of China's version number censorship system, only a few games on the market can get a version number. So developing a good base game and using the volunteer work of the mod community for that game to continuously commercialize looting became a business model. It seems that they believes that the community ecology is like an automatic incubation pool, which can acquire more content at low cost and sell it at a high price.

Although NetEase uses Warcraft III and Minecraft communities to create hundreds of millions of yuan in turnover every year, most similar imitations failed.

NetEase launched "Project Beaver" as an attempt by the mod game-making community to make a similar imitation. And in many self-developed games, NetEase tried to add basic custom map gameplay (although it can only place objects and perform simple interaction logic). But none of these attempts garnered much attention.

Compared to NetEase, China has another bigger gaming company, Tencent. The promotion of "Ylands" and "Roblox" represented by Tencent in China has encountered various problems and cannot be further developed. I think the problem may lie in the inability to build a good UGC community.

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Historically, China entered the era of personal computers too late, and the industrial base and talent pool for developing PC-side graphics missed the best time. But on the other hand, China entered the era of smartphones almost at the same time as the United States, and it began to have the advantage of latecomers. I don't think Chinese companies really intend to invest a lot in PCs. They may make efforts on the mobile side, because technically this may be relatively lower threshold and has great potential, after all, it is backed by a huge population market.

From a global perspective, the map editor or game creation platform is a large-scale comprehensive industrial project. Only big companies across social, educational and tech seem to be able to master it, and it will take decades at least. Apparently only Unity3D and Unreal Engine are starting to have real prototypes of such platforms.
 
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