Activision after acquiring Blizzard quickly became the one of the single biggest players in the industry in terms of value. While it’s difficult to imagine what direction the series will take from here in the coming years, much less the next 25, it will surely be exciting to see.Īround last year, Activision/Blizzard's market capitalization was valued around 71.6 billion so the "seemingly" exorbitant cost of this acquisition is actually pretty justified (especially when it seems that for a while Act/Blzd seemed to be looking for a buyer). Indeed, we can expect the series to remain a household name for many years to come. In addition, the most recent titles (Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, and Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town) have shown strong fiscal profit margins for the series. Just last year, Marvelous secured a working relationship with Chinese gaming mogul Tencent, and the two companies have furthered the expansion of the series with an in-development mobile title - Story of Seasons Online. Despite all of these hurdles, the fact remains that Story of Seasons continues to prove itself as a steadfast flagship IP. With the previous director, Yoshifumi Hashimoto, leaving Marvelous mid-development of Pioneers of Olive Town and taking key staff with him, the series former localization studio making lower quality knockoffs that compete using the former western brand name, and the task of developing multiple games at once with remakes now entering the release cycle for the series, Story of Seasons has been facing challenge after challenge. There are still challenges the series has to face however. (Source 1, Source 2: Source 2 is a short, recommended read). Therefore, it wants all women, in particular those who are educated, to enter the “wife pool” for these unmarried men. The state fears the unmarried men will become violent and/or gay, leading to “social instability and insecurity”. More importantly, the government sees a threat in the M/F sex imbalance (high M, low F) that has commonly been attributed to the country’s “one child policy” between 1979-2015, which encouraged female infanticide / abortion of female foetuses in a culture that favours surname-carrying boys. The reason behind the campaign: birth rates are plummeting and the state wants educated women, in particular, to nurture a high quality, next generation workforce. The government started a campaign that, among other things, associated women’s education level with ugliness, and their unmarried status with pickiness, moral degeneracy. In 2007, the China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation (中華全國婦女聯合會), coined the term 剩女 (literally, “leftover women”) for unmarried, urban women over 27 years old. People’s Daily, the Official State Newspaper, previously published a positive opinion piece on fan economy in 2019, estimating its worth at 90 billion RMB (~13.7 billion USD) per year. Such “fan economy” would benefit the government, even if it doesn’t have direct stakes in the companies in and outside c-ent. The commercial sector outside c-ent is also eager for replications of TU’s success-they need more “top traffic” (頂流) idols like Gg and Dd whose fans are sufficiently devoted to drive the sales of their products. The tightening of censorship rules also means production is associated with more risk. The anti-corruption, anti-tax-fraud campaign started by the Xi regime in 2018, which cumulated to a sudden (and unofficial) collection of 3 years of back-taxes from studios and stars, has drained a significant amount of its capital the number of new TV dramas being filmed fell 45% between 20, and production companies have been closing by the tens of thousands. C-ent is currently in a financial bleak winter.
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