Nurturing games

I worked at Tencent in a variety of roles from 2011 through 2016, when I was transferred to a Tencent subsidiary. They changed my job description about once every six months. I started as a writer for Facebook games, then became a market researcher (??), then became an entry-level producer in bizdev. The market research roles taught me a lot about how mobile game stores in China discussed genre. We constantly struggled to explain games to our colleagues in Shenzhen - the genre names commonly used in the US did not match up exactly to the genre names on Tencent's stores. The US had more fine gradations of RPG, with names that players in China were unfamiliar with. (I remember a huge fight over the exact meaning of the term "action RPG".) Meanwhile, there were entire top-level genres on Tencent mobile app stores that US players would not have bothered to identify. I strongly remember someone showing me a top-level genre of arcade fishing games at one point. The big one, though, was…