> outright horrible software (QQ, Qihoo 360, and in fact the majority of Chinese-produced software installed on a Windows computer of a typical user)

In general homegrown software from China is not comparable in quality to US ones. But they are not horrible. Actually, Chinese companies' software might be inferior only to US produced ones. AFAIK, there is no prominent software that are produced outside of US and are compared favorable to Chinese produced ones.

Your examples of QQ and Qihoo 360 are quite bad examples of "horrible software". They are indeed bloat ware, horrendous privacy invader, outright money seeking in their features, etc. Those cannot be taken granted as evidence of their overall horribleness. In fact, they are prominent software that address Chinese people's everyday needs (IM and security); and their overwhelming popularity is a strong evidence that they achieved their goals successfully.

To say they are horrible without specific qualifications and evidences are a sign of biased views.

> bland repetitive art, bugs, grinding and paying to win.
Copy cats are prevalent, bugs are often ignored, paying to win is quite a popular options for players.

B.U.T., these qualifications cannot be used to describe the players. Actually, Chinese game players are such a huge population that a large number of them quite closely follow western trends. They play ps4 and xbox1, they know all the memes about trending western games.

But there are many of them do enjoy the low-quality stuff you mentioned. Many of them lack education and healthy attitude towards gaming and life.

But this statement clearly blended diverse reality into a stereotype.

>A strong nationalistic sentiment makes Chinese players favour games based on their culture and history, which is mostly unknown outside of China because of how closed the country has been for centuries and the "foreign barbarians can't possibly understand our culture" attitude.

Frankly speaking, I have no idea where did you draw such conclusion... This statement is outright a demonization of general Chinese public...

There is no strong culture of "foreign barbarians can't possibly understand our culture". Foreigners are routinely treated with better-than-normal-Chinese standards. Foreign cultures are always described as superior to status-quo of Chinese society. etc.

"A strong nationalistic sentiment" This might be true. But link it with "Chinese players favor games based on their culture and history" seems overly general. I mean, A.N.Y.O.N.E. would naturally favor games based on their culture and history. Given the fundamental difference between eastern and western culture, I see no possibility for Chinese players favor non-eastern games. Actually, Japanese players favor their own games, I doubt anyone would link that to Japanese "nationalistic sentiment". In reality, Japanese games are generally very well-received in China. Considering the bitter history between the 2 nations, the claimed "nationalistic sentiment" hardly play any role in players' preference to games.

> In addition, the content is usually limited to the Four Great Classical Novels because that's the only thing a Chinese layman is familiar with.

First that's not true, there are diverse genres of games, most of them are not based on the classic novels. In reality, only 1 of the four, i.e., "Legends of the Three Kingdoms" is predominantly a material for popular games. In reality, there are a huge number of copy cat games of games are popular outside of China. This statement is plainly false.

Second, only thing a Chinese layman is familiar with. I have to counter this. Typical Chinese high schoolers learn history and classical Chinese literature. They learn hundreds of poets and novels from ancient china to modern ones. China has a high-school graduate rate of 98% [1]. They even include modern wuxia novel from JinYong and SciFi classics from Cixin Liu. If you think such a population who are exposed to a huge collection of historical and modern arts are only familiar with 4 classical novels, I have to say that you must be irrational.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_China

> But also, due to censorship, it is impossible to use more interesting settings without getting unwanted attention from the government.

I do not think censorship has much to do with the game genres. As I said, there are a huge collection of diverse games. If you ever play those games, you know that as long as you do not touch politics (for which most countries exercise similar policies) you can do whatever you want.

> A recent development in censorship is [1], which bans the use of Traditional Chinese characters (as opposed to the simplified ones in use after the Communist Party takeover and which are in use in all Chinese-speaking countries outside the PRC) and English words.

> A recent development in censorship is [1], which bans the use of Traditional Chinese characters (as opposed to the simplified ones in use after the Communist Party takeover and which are in use in all Chinese-speaking countries outside the PRC) and English words.

I am not familiar with this. But I dont think banning traditional Chinese and english words have much impact on producing popular games for mass Chinese players. They are not educated to read in traditional Chiense. On the other hand, if missing English words cause trouble for players to play the game, then the game wont be successful anyway...

> Combined with a large potential player base and lack of foreign competition, even the most atrocious abomination of a game can make some money in the internal market.

Well, lack of foreign competition is a thing, lack of competition is another. Trust me, if there is one thing that China does not lack, it is domestic competition... The brutality and amount of hard work you need to put in to survive in Chinese market is beyond imagination. For example, most companies have policy like 996, working 6 days, 9am to 9pm.

The claim that "even the most atrocious abomination of a game can make some money in the internal market" is just a huge exaggeration of the reality. Sure, the most popular games are not comparable in quality to non-Chinese produces ones, but they are not rubbish... At least, LoL, the most popular Moba in China, is not rubbish...