Since KSR was announced around this time last year, we’ve had Rare reps out promoting the game across the world from its Gamescom debut in Cologne to the Tokyo Game Show, Eurogamer Expo in London, Paris Games Week and of course Comic-Con in San Diego only a few weeks back.
One place we hadn’t really covered was Asia, but now with the market opening up and the Xbox One about to launch there with KSR and a clutch of other games among the advance guard, ChinaJoy 2014 presented itself as the perfect time and place. This time around we sent Pete and Nick from Rare to do the on-stage honours. Here’s Pete with a rundown of how it went!
28/07/2014
Arrival! Nick and I got to the hotel on Monday morning, freshened up from around 18 hours of travelling and decided to go for a walk around Pudong district to get the lay of the land. Our hotel was close to Century Park so we began our journey there and ended up at the Shanghai Tower and World Financial Center.
We popped into a shopping mall to take a look around and were surprised to find a lot of influential Western shops and brands. On the way back we took the scenic route, walking along the Huangpu River while the sun began to set.
29/07/2014
On Tuesday we ventured out to the Microsoft offices in Shanghai where we met up with several other Microsoft representatives participating in ChinaJoy. We had lunch at the Shanghai Min, where our host ordered several local dishes including jellyfish and others probably best not to mention!
During the afternoon we toured the local tech shops and grey markets where you could purchase imported electronic goods. Later we went over to the convention centre to help with setup, finding the team hard at work putting the finishing touches to the Xbox booth. The Shanghai New Expo Centre is absolutely massive.
30/07/2014
The Xbox booth was finalised during Wednesday afternoon and the Kinect Stage was completed in the early evening, ready for each of the teams to conduct rehearsals.
Nick and I split up in the evening so that Nick could present KSR at the media presentation evening where the release of the console was announced. News also broke that a premium day one Xbox One console pack will be available in China on September 23rd, containing the console, Kinect sensor, Day 1 Achievement and several games including Kinect Sports Rivals.
I met up with our emcees, Peko and Viola, to discuss the format of the Kinect Sports Rivals demonstration and go through a few warm-up sessions. We had two shows for KSR, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Nick joined us once the media presentation had wrapped up and went through a few finer points of our presentation until 11pm.
The Show
Each day we entered the show at 8am, and even at that time the crowds waiting to get in were phenomenal. Saturday was the busiest day – it’s estimated that 90,000 visited on that day alone, and you could hardly move around the show floor.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Kinect Sports Rivals stood out with huge numbers of people wanting to see more of the game, the audience increasing in size each day. In both of our daily presentations we demonstrated the Champion scanning tech followed by Wake Racing, and the crowd were blown away by both demos. As we prepared the stage and showed our title screen, people would start gathering in anticipation. They were fascinated by the Champion tech, cheering every time Nick went through the scan and his Champion was revealed, and again as he sped around Harbor Trail showing some of the more intricate Wake Racing techniques.
We also had quite a few unexpected things happen while we were out there, but being hit by a typhoon has to top the list! Torrential rain and gale force winds came tearing through Shanghai for a couple of days, but even that didn’t dissuade consumers from coming to the show.
Overall, ChinaJoy was huge. We have never seen any game event quite so big. More than 3000 titles were on display and around 250,000 people came to visit the expo over the four days. The atmosphere was frenetic with immeasurable amounts of energy on display from both the guests and the companies showing their products.
Looking at the popularity of the Xbox One console and the games on display during ChinaJoy I see a bright future: the market is vast and consumers were incredibly excited about Xbox One. The booth was packed with people every day truly hyped about what was on show, and the pre-order numbers during the show were amazingly positive. When we launch it’ll be great to see Chinese developers working on the platform and creating spectacular new experiences.