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Wang Miaoyi’s tiny one-bedroom apartment doubles as her design studio and is filled with boxes of gaming magazines, figurines, and sci-fi novels.
The 30-year-old game developer is the child of the county’s tech boom. She studied at her one of China’s top universities and her company has gone on to great success with award-winning games released on Nintendo Switch her console and her PC gaming platform. Steam plans to expand to other game platforms.
Their ambitions, and those of many others in China’s vast high-tech industry, are now driven by increased government control of the sector, tighter regulation, and a bitter trade war with the United States that is stifling growth. I’m facing a calculation inside.
“[In 2015] it became fashionable to have a startup. So many young people started small businesses such as game development and dreamed of being free while making a lot of money,” she said. “But they now realize it’s really unrealistic.”
Until last year, China’s technology industry has experienced rapid growth for years. Companies like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd nearly doubled in value in 2017 alone, investing heavily in multi-billion dollar expansions into cloud, offline retail, and finance.
Wang said he had abandoned hopes of releasing the game on a new Chinese platform for now, closing the original studio that developed it and instead working on the update with a small crew of freelancers. Say… For cost reasons, we moved from Beijing’s Zhongguancun tech center to a more affordable suburb in the westernmost part of the city.