Recently, a simulation game of life after retirement has caused an intense conflict in China because of the gender and physical characteristics of the NPCs in the game.
The game, unimaginatively named Retirement Simulator, released on Steam on April 20, describes itself as a “simulation game that allows players that are busy at work or study to experience their happy retirement life in advance”. The core gameplay utilizes a card-based roguelike combat system to generate different story paths that look at different kinds of retirement life in China.
On paper, this sounds like a very interesting idea and shouldn't have tangled it up with the issues it's facing right now.
However, the game is rather a card battle RPG than an actual open ended life simulator game. The game has a predetermined male protagonist, and a plot around his retirement life and personal achievements.
On the day of the game's release, people were pointing out the game is insensitive to many political issues, and posts of these accusations are getting thousands of comments and retweets.
Some content in the game just feels inappropriate to some players. For example, the male protagonist in the game speaks offensively to his wife and describes women with sexually suggestive words like “thirsty” in certain game situations.
The predetermined protagonist also caused problems. Some terms used in the game as well as character designs seem to focus on oversexualizing female physical characteristics, namely the excessively large breasts.
After receiving the backlash, the developer, DoubleThink Studio, quickly modified the relevant content of the game, deleting parts of the story and changing some of the controversial narratives.
This might have been a decent effort to save them from the brewing storm. But in choosing to reduce the size of NPC’s breasts, other groups of players grew dissatisfied as well, and felt this being excessive.
These players pointed out that many of the criticisms come from people who don’t actually care or play the game. These players also mentioned that there are many bugs affecting the game that should be given priority over appeasing certain political ideas. With the gradually increasing dissatisfaction, more and more players began to review bomb the game on Steam, making the game quickly fall from 80% positive on April 20 to 36% now.
Players also pointed out that this game has far more problems than enormous breasts. Racial discrimination and the promotion of violence are also present in the game, but the developer addressed only the breasts.
At this point, the whole fiasco has been reduced to a typical internet slugfest. Where many players are review bombing the game, while others have called for support on social media, leaving positive reviews for the game in response.
The developer, DoubleThink Studio, has not given any explanation for their actions after the fiasco started, and this silence is not working in their favor.
Some players suspect that this whole thing is a marketing stunt planned by the developers to increase exposure and sales for their game by deliberately putting themselves in the center of a social media gender war. Some even suspect that the account that commented at the beginning was actually a smurf secretly owned by the developer. At the same time, others claim that the developers’ quick modification of the game’s content and price hike (from 38 to 43 RMB) of the game were part of a pre-planned strategy.
Whether this is a marketing stunt or the developers are just being insensitive throughout, the bad rap around this game is not going to go away.