Wang Miaoyi’s small one-bedroom apartment, which doubles as her design studio, is overflowing with game magazines, figurines and boxes of sci-fi novels.
The 30-year old game developer is a child of the county’s tech boom: she studied at one of China’s top universities and her company hit it big with an award-winning game that was published on Nintendo’s Switch console and the PC gaming platform Steam, with plans for roll-out on other game platforms.
Now her ambitions – and those of many others across China’s giant tech industry – are facing a reckoning, amid rising state control over the sector, tightening regulation and a biting trade war with the United States stymieing growth.
“(In 2015) doing a start-up was popular. So many young people set up small businesses, like developing games, and dreamed of making big money as well as being free,” she said. “But they found out now it’s really unrealistic.”
Wang says she has had to abandon for now hopes of releasing the game on new platforms in China, closing the original studio that developed it and working instead on updates with a skeleton crew of freelancers. She has moved from the Beijing tech hub of Zhongguancun to the city’s cheaper far-west outskirts to cut costs.
She is not alone. Reuters interviewed a dozen tech industry insiders, from gig economy workers to investors, who said that the boom days of easy returns looked to be over.
Until last year, China’s tech industry had enjoyed years of breakneck growth. Firms including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd almost doubled in value in…
… Read More
—-
Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – Urban Christian News