The Sword Star, the exclusive game developed by Shift Up in Korea, officially landed on the PC platform and received a unanimous and positive response, while online players broke SonyPC’s record and became Sony’s best-performing PS5 at the end of the PC. Paul Tassi, a Forbes game journalist, has recently commented on the audience structure of Swordstar, prompting widespread criticism by players.
Paul Tassi wrote on social platforms that the daily number of online players on Swordstar shows an interesting phenomenon, as the “gold hours” of Western players coincide with the low times of online characters. Based on this data, Paul Tassi assumes that the swordsman group is predominantly Asian. Some of the players felt that they were afraid to suggest that the game was unpopular in the West, or that it was marked as a stereotyped image of the Asian game culture, although Paul Tassi also stressed that “this is not a bad word”.
Some critics say: “Tassi portrays the Asian orientation of Swordsstar as a problem, ignoring the global appeal of the game. Swordstar also has a large number of fans in Europe and America, and Tassi’s data are too one-sided.” The player community has also held discussions on the r/StellarBlade plate in Reddit to question whether Tassi inadvertently downgraded the Asian game market.
Sword Star was first sold on the PS5 platform in 2024, and with a good figure and face of a woman’s role, has emerged from the market for video games that are now ravaged by “political correctness”. The game, centred on the adventure stories of the female hero Eve, brought together aesthetic and science fiction elements from Asia and attracted global players. After coming online on 12 June, steam quickly took over the best sales list, and, according to official data, the first three days of the PC edition had already exceeded 1 million.
Paul Tassi’s comments ignited the player’s anger at the long-standing cultural and geographical bias in the game industry. Playes developed in Asia, such as Sword Star, Black Myth: The Goku, are often labelled “regionalized” by Western media, ignoring their global influence. Players question: “Tassi’s story gives the impression that Asian games can only attract Asian players and completely ignore the global sales of Swordstar”. Considering that Tassi had described Swordsstar as a “Pretty Men’s Game”, this comment was further questioned by the players.
As early as August 2024, when Swordsstar was monopolized on the PS5 platform, Paul Tassi published a critical article on Swordsstar. He claimed that the game’s super-high player rating did not stem from its good action design and visual performance, but from the fact that the player group was poisoned by “cultural warfare”, viewed as a “counter-attack weapon” to the so-called “political correct” game, and even suggested that the player was motivated by a superficial obsession with the “hot” female protagonist in the game.
In fact, players do not object to the diversity of roles and contexts in the game, but rather to “diverse” as a marketing head or a political task, at the expense of game play, optimization and depth of content.
