Chinese players sent a protest truck to Stellar Blade dev’s office

Bilibili

As South Korean game developer Shift Up is gearing up for the release of Stellar Blade, its first triple-A game and PS5 exclusive, a surprise awaited the studio’s employees on the morning of April 4, 2024 – a truck with a digital billboard was parked in front of the office, displaying protest messages in Japanese and Korean.

Chinese players of Shift Up’s popular gacha game, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, were behind this initiative and used this way to express their negative feelings about a planned change to the title.

Shift Up wants to make older characters more relevant by providing players with a way to buff them. This involves pulling additional copies of these units through the gacha system or buying them when they’re available through the in-app store. Some players aren’t happy with this and would like to see these plans change, specifically lowering the required amount of duplicates to obtain the buffs. They aren’t alone with this – recent surveys held by the developer led to similar feedback and it looks like a change in that direction may be implemented.

Nikke has made Shift Up into a powerhouse. / Shift Up

Though not exactly widespread elsewhere, sending trucks with protest messages is somewhat established practice in South Korea – what’s funny is that the Chinese organizers of the protest not only decided to display their message in both Japanese and Korean, they also didn’t even bother to translate their words correctly, probably simply using an auto-translator.

Adding another layer of weirdness to this is the fact that while Nikke supports Simplified Chinese as a language option as well as payments through a Chinese service, it does not have an official server for the region, so most Chinese gamers have to play through the Japanese server.

According to the organizer, who just started playing Nikke in January 2024, the move cost around $1,060 USD. It looks like his actions proved divisive even among the Chinese player base, with a few voices condemning the organizer and apologizing for the affair.

It almost seems like some Korean truck rental company ran an advertising campaign in China, because another truck was sent to Blue Archive developer Nexon Games this week in order to protest a collaboration between that game and Mahjong Soul.

Is this revenge for South Korean players sending a hot air balloon over HoYoverse’s HQ to transmit a message? Who knows. Only one thing is certain: Chinese gamers aren’t afraid of using international means to make their displeasure clear.