To Face My Awkward Past: The Original "Atonement" Opinion Piece
This post is hard to find online now, but it was truly viral back then.
Foreword:
As all of my "old fans" have known, this article was the start of me going from a "positive figure" to a "controversial figure". It directly led to me quitting Tieba after being a ten year user, and becoming a member of Weibo.
This re-release was done in the spirit of "restoring history". It is guaranteed that no words from [the Chinese version of] the original work is altered, and the post is kept in its original form.
Around 500 characters in length, the opinion piece was more of a forum post than an article, pale in comparison to the "articles" I usually write. The piece was posted in the 3DS community on Tieba, and it enraged almost all gaming Tieba communities imeidately. You wouldn't know how bad the situation was if you hadn't experienced the situation. If you had, you would have seen that users were attacking me even from the most unrelated Tieba communities.
The original post was long deleted, and most Tieba admins purged almost all the repost because "you guys need to stop arguing over this, we're sick of the spamming". As of right now, this post was almost lost to the times. It was only last month in a remote forum post that I found someone made a copy of my original article, and thus I was finally able to recover it.
By the way, this was the historical background at the time of the article: The Nintendo 3DS was region locked with almost no releases in the Chinese language, but Korean localizations for the 3DS came out one after another.
How exactly was my opinion back then? I don't really care. Let it be something for the future to judge. This re-release is just for an archival or backup purpose.
The original text is as follows:
Both Korea and China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) were excluded from Nintendo's localization plans in the past 20 years. Nintendo entered both markets at the beginning of the 21st century, and both have long standing issues that lead to rampant piracy.
However, the Koreans still contributed quite a significant number of sales for Nintendo of Korea despite piracy being available. New Super Mario Bros. Wii sold 440K copies, and a lot of DS games sold over 200K copies. Don't forget that both consoles were already cracked.
But China? Piracy was also rampant here. The first batch of New Super Mario Bros. [DS] still did not sell, and the launch week sales were less than 1000 copies. As for the other games, only WarioWare [: Touched!] had some amount of sales, as well as Polarium, which got its sales from console bundles. All other titles were complete flops.
Nintendo saw all of it.
In 2011, the Korean version of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was released simultaneously as the Japanese and American versions.
In 2012, Nintendo of Korea announced thrice the amount of localized Korean titles as compared to localized Chinese titles.
In 2013, Animal Crossing: New Leaf was released in Korea, even earlier than the American release.
Almost all of the first party DS and Wii titles were released in Korea. Second party games started from a delay of more than 1 year to a delay of a few months, to nowadays with some titles having same-day releases as Japan and the US. These games got strong love and support from the Korean gamers, visible from their high software to hardware ratio: They almost bought every game as it came out.
Do not blame Nintendo for giving us Chinese gamers the cold shoulder. In the last generation, the results of Nintendo's efforts were drastically different in China and Korea, so how could Nintendo not favor one over the other?
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but in this generation, if we Chinese gamers still do not atone for our sins, we can't blame Nintendo for completely giving up on us in future.
After all, Nintendo is a business, not a charity.
~ THE END ~