'Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' Is A Fake Indie Game

Today’s article will revisit a video I made earlier this year with regard to the launch and success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. You can watch the video here if you want, but I will reiterate all the information here within this article, to the best of my ability.

As of the 2025 Game Awards, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has officially become the most award-winning game in the award show’s 12-year history. The game secured 13 nominations, taking home nine awards, including Game of the Year. Expedition 33 also received awards for Best Narrative, Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Score and Music, Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game, Best Performance (Jennifer English), and Best RPG.

Of all these awards, there ought to be some heavy scrutiny regarding the “independent” labels because their attribution begs the question: what exactly is an “Independent” or “Indie” game?

When Expedition 33 was published, by most accounts, the game emerged as an overnight sensation. The game was a French deployed RPG (JRPG?) that seemingly materialized from obscurity to sell over 2 million copies in just 2 weeks. The game was also accompanied (somehow) by a film deal that was already in place prior to the game’s release. For such a small and, allegedly, independent team, this was a curious origin story for an indie game.

Kepler Interactive

Expedition 33, which has been widely celebrated and won multiple awards at The Game Awards Show, was launched under the banner of Kepler Interactive, a publisher that styles itself as independent and decentralized. But what many may not realize is that the game is neither Kepler’s first critical success nor even their first game to receive a film adaptation. A pattern arises here and bears closer scrutiny.

In February of 2022, Kepler Interactive published Sifu, a video game that achieved both critical and commercial success. Like Expedition 33, Sifu was followed by a film adaptation deal with Story Kitchen, although that agreement materialized ten months post-release.

This raises a few questions: Who is Kepler Interactive and how did they, ostensibly a new player in the video games industry, attain such leverage?

Many news articles that talk about Kepler’s success relay a conventional narrative: Kepler is a decentralized collection of studios and a publisher owned by its developers. Much of this coverage remains cursory, but two sources stand out. The first comes from a 2021 article from the website, kakuchopurei.com.

The article offers a succinct overview of the company’s structure and ambitions. It observes, “The last time we heard of a publishing company run by game developers was back in 2003. It came out and fizzled after a year or so of hype. Hopefully Kepler Interactive and its motley don’t fall for the same trap and actually keep word on their promised titles.” This brands Kepler as a developer-led co-owned indie publisher wich naturally appeals to creators who seek artistic freedom without the liabilities of total independence.

The second source comes from a French interview with the creative lead of Expedition 33, Guillaume Broche. I have skipped to the appropriate timecode:

Translated: “We really sympathize with Kepler Interactive, which is a publisher made up of numerous independent dev studios that reunite to create one publisher. We really wanted this indie vibe and overall to keep this creative liberty. If we have this creative liberty at 100% and someone gives a [expletive] in the end, this is what we had. And that’s what’s so great. And that’s the big reason why this whole thing worked. It’s that Kepler supported us. Actually, when we made play tests with 30 people, they gave us feedback.”

The ethos described here is one of autonomy undergirded by structure. It is the illusion of independence, buttressed by an infrastructure sophisticated enough to run coordinated user testing in early feedback loops. Needless to say, this is not quite a return to the romanticized grassroots model of indie development nor is it absolutely a project constrained by the grip of corporate oversight, but a hybrid form. Expedition 33 came about as a result of a curated independence facilitated by a publisher that remains agile in its rhetoric while quietly securing movie deals and multi-million dollar launches. Such arrangements are not unprecedented; they bear resemblance to what other industries have long perfected.

The word “independent” has been turned into its own genre and is used to market projects. This includes corporate projects, despite the irony. Corporations have achieved this due a clever repackaging of control.

Here’s an analogy: calling Expedition 33 an indie hit is like calling Rebecca Black’s viral YouTube fame a “grassroots phenomenon.” Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, published in 2011, was uploaded like any other YouTube video but behind it was a wealthy parent who financed the production, the promotion, and the polish. This created the illusion of something organic even though it was, in essence, a boutique media package.

To the mainstream gaming press, Kepler Interactive is presented as a kind of utopian exception to the traditional publisher/developer dynamic. Instead, Kepler presented itself as a democratized developer-led alternative that purports to break the historical chains of top-down creative control. This perpetuates a mythos of a decentralized network where artists (and not those meddlesome executives) supposedly set the terms of production. And you can see why this narrative would be so appealing. The modern consumer base is becoming increasingly wary of corporate influence and gamers are eager to support the indie underdog.

Yet, in the financial press, a different face of Kepler emerges, one less romantic and more institutional. In a 2021 Reuters article entitled “Gaming Company Kepler raises $120 Million from China’s NetEase” offers an illuminating contrast.

Here, CEO Alexis Garavaryan describes Kepler’s internal governance structure: “We have a studio committee which meets on a weekly basis. They get involved in major company decisions but they don’t get involved in individual studio decisions. So the studios remain independent.”

So, studios are independent, but only provided their autonomy does not conflict with the collective strategic direction? This reveals the artificiality of a “freedom” framed within the polite margins of capital efficiency.

The article goes on to draw direct comparison with Sweden’s Embracer Group, another conglomerate that purchased smaller studios while allowing them nominal operational freedom. This model helped Embracer Group become Europe’s largest video game company. The takeaway is this: creative liberty, when properly managed, is not only compatible with aggressive corporate scaling, it has become its main selling point.

Here then is the dual mythology of Kepler Interactive: Indie anarchism for the press releases, strategic coherence for the investors

The article also casually notes that while Garavaryan declined to disclose Kepler’s valuation, he confirmed that NetEase would remain a minority investor. The phrasing was obviously meant to imply that NetEase’s presence would be peripheral, not a directive.

Kowloon Nights

Alexis Garavaryan is the architect behind Kepler’s hybrid model of indie aesthetics and global capital. Garavaryan’s resume reads like a compressed history of the industry’s convergence between east and west, indie and corporate.

He began at Ubisoft in 2008 as part of their partners’ team. Then moved in 2012 to Microsoft’s Xbox division where he worked on first party and indie developer relations. In 2015, he joined Tencent’s investment arm, helping bring independent games into China through its Wii game service. This eastward turn would shape the next phase of his career. In 2017, Garavaryan cofounded Kowloon Knights, a $100 million global games fund. It was a lean operation with just 10 employees, but its financial footprint is far more substantial. According to a 2020 Game Daily article, Garavaryan’s experience with Tencent and Xbox created a continuity between independent developer support and multinational strategy.

“Garavaryan’s experience in the East should prove valuable for indies as well,” the article states.

The name “Kowloon Knights” is indicative of the Asian influence in the fund. Not only is it a reference to Hong Kong’s Kowloon City, but the primary source of money is a group of undisclosed investors in Asia, which Garavaryan believes are more risk tolerant. There’s something revealing in the industry’s preferred archetype of patronage: anonymity coupled with risk tolerance.

As was stated before, the idea is to create the illusion of a financier without any ties to meddling executives or marketers. Instead, these games have invisible underwriters who fund creative freedom while abstaining from direct interference. This is a theology of capital in which Divine Providence never interferes with free will (though it always guides it.) This ideology is not articulated explicitly, and that is purposeful. Instead, one only needs to trace the careers of people like Guillaume Broche and Alexis Garavaryan while connecting the dots of transnational capital.

Garavaryan, in particular, presents a case study in a new technocratic independence: a mode of development wherein creative autonomy is never quite severed from the umbilical cord of investment. His progression from Xbox to Tencent to Kepler Interactive charts a vision of indie production that is meticulously scaffolded by institutions of global finance and platform governance. To say that Garavaryan once worked at Tencent is not merely to furnish a CV detail, it is to recognize a deeper infrastructure of alignment.

The fact that games like Sifu and Expedition 33 found commercial success in both Western markets and in China is unlikely to be explained solely by genre appeal or marketing prowess.

If we are dissuaded from naming structural advantages for fear of seeming conspiratorial, we should instead ask why that explanation is so persistently discouraged. The point being, I am not saying the fact that Expedition 33 performed well in the Chinese market indicates some grandiose covert manipulation. Instead, I am pointing out how independent success frequently emerges from conditions that are anything but independent.

Games like Expedition 33 do not arrive by accident. They are purposely positioned. One such axis of positioning is Microsoft’s Game Pass where Expedition 33 launched. This can seem like a minor footnote unless one considers the architecture of visibility that undergirds modern game discovery. A Game Pass launch is not the indie equivalent of a roadside fruit stand, it is an entrance into a curated retail cathedral. Its inclusion signals alignment not just with quality of the game itself but with the strategic goals of the platform.

Behind this carefully-engineered visibility stands a scaffolding of investment networks and at its center figures like Jay Chi, co-founder of Kowloon Knights and, according to industry consensus, one of its primary financiers.

Chi’s public resume centers on his current role at Maker’s Fund, a venture capital group so entangled in the gaming sector that enumerating its full reach would be less an appendix than a treatise. But as with so many actors in this space, the relevant information is not only what is present, but what is inherited.

Chi is a former partner at McKinsey & Company, a firm whose cultural footprint exceeds its name recognition. McKinsey’s claim to fame goes beyond its consultancy, it is a global node of managerial rationality: an author of the very logic by which capital assesses, governs, and extracts value. That Chi’s pedigree traces through McKinsey is not just incidental, is formative.

In addition, Samuel Sun Lee, now chief operating officer at Kepler Interactive, also bears the McKinsey imprint, along with prior posts in banking at HSBC and the Bank of China.

Note these are not creative backgrounds, they are business infrastructural backgrounds. Yes, indeed, the people who now shape independent game publishing are not drawn from the grassroots. There’s no parents’ garage stories here or modding forums, but ordained financial institutions--some of which have been implicated in some of the most consequential economic and political entanglements of the past two decades. Beyond being financiers, these people are architects of the present economic order as it governs the media industry. Their hands guide the direction of what is, ostensibly, independent gaming.

The Fairchild Initiative

One final architect worth recovering now scrubbed from the foreground of public discourse is the Fairchild Initiative. Once a prominent feature of the Kowloon Nights website (though it has since faded into digital obscurity) its ideological function remains potent.

In this interview, Kendall Deacon Davis, adviser with Kowloon Knights, outlines a vision for reshaping the relationship between independent developers and the broader games industry. Kowloon Knights, he explains, is a global games fund designed to decouple financing from the traditional publisher–developer model. Historically, publishing and funding have been tightly bound, leaving studios with little leverage and creating inequitable dynamics. By contrast, Kowloon Knights exists to tilt the playing field, offering developers direct access to funding without the strings of publisher control. The goal is to empower creative voices (those with distinct styles and visions) and to enable them to bring their projects to life on their own terms.

Davis emphasizes that diversity has always been central to Kowloon Knights’ mission. The fund’s team is diverse, and so are the studios it supports. This diversity is not treated as a token gesture but as a driver of innovation: the more varied the voices, the more interesting and distinctive the games that emerge. Supporting diverse creators, he argues, not only leads to better titles but also shifts the tone, subject matter, and representation within the industry. In this way, Kowloon Knights positions itself as a catalyst for cultural change, not just financial support.

The Fairchild Initiative represents the most explicit manifestation of this commitment. With a $2 million allocation dedicated to black creators and black-led studios, the initiative seeks to transform successful projects into sustainable studios. Davis stresses that the aim is not merely to fund individual games but to foster environments where diverse hiring practices and creative cultures can flourish. By enabling black developers to establish studios with long-term viability, the initiative aspires to alter the demographic makeup of the industry itself. Each successful project becomes a step in a longer journey toward equity and representation, a process Davis likens to the proverbial “journey of a thousand miles” beginning with a single step.

While Kowloon Knights is not a publisher, Davis notes that the team provides guidance, advice, and behind-the-scenes support to help developers cross the finish line. The philosophy is clear: empower developers, support diverse voices, and build pathways to sustainable success. In doing so, Kowloon Knights and the Fairchild Initiative challenge entrenched industry structures and offer a model in which independence and diversity are not exceptions but the foundation for better, more resonant games.

The French Government

Another key advocate behind Expedition 33 is the regional authorities of the Occitanie and the National Film and Arts Board (the CNC or National Center for Cinema and Animation). The Occitanie Region is a county in southern France stretching from the Pyrenees mountains to the Mediterranean coast. Known for its picturesque tourism, Occitanie has, in recent years, recast itself as an emerging industrial and tech zone under the leadership of Carole Delga, a member of the French Socialist Party (PS) and President of the region since 2016.

Here is an official promotional article entitled “Occitanie, Land of Success for the Video Game”:

With 1,500 jobs in 125 companies located in Occitanie, the video game sector is fully aligned with this proactive policy to enable its development. The region supports local businesses through individual grants, prestigious partnerships, and local initiatives. The goal to encourage creative diversity, stimulate economic dynamism, support stakeholder growth, and showcase regional expertise.

And now, let us now turn to the CNC, a powerful media agency under the French Ministry of Culture. Its stated mission is to regulate and promote France’s cultural output in film, television, and increasingly video games. The CNC plays a crucial role in shaping the French gaming industry through a system of grants and tax credits. According to the CNC’s official documentation, video game tax credits provides a tax rebate of up to 20% on qualifying production expenses for studios operating in France. To be eligible, a game must meet specific criteria:

1. A minimum production budget of €100,000 euro.

2. Clear intent to distribute commercially, and more curiously,

3. A development team composed primarily of EU or EA nationals (non-Europeans who have obtained French residency.)

4. Additionally, the project must pass a cultural test, scoring enough points on a rubric meant to assess its contribution to the diversity of French and European creation.

In the official records of the CNC, the assessment of Expedition 33 appears in unambiguous terms. Its value to the French gaming industry has been affirmed in plain bureaucratic language. But the more pressing question here is not what the CNC thinks of Expedition 33 but, rather, who precisely speaks on behalf of Expedition 33. In other words, who determines which projects merit public patronage under the guise of cultural support?

China and NetEase

Contrary to the image of the CNC as a haven of French state-appointed civil servants, the actual selection process is outsourced, curated by a rotating panel of industry representatives drawn from the broader ecosystem of game development. These individuals are nominally unaffiliated, but their connections are anything but abstract. One name in particular merits closer attention: Sébastien Tasserie, seated on the CNC’s funding committee. He is a representative of NetEase, a Chinese gaming conglomerate with global reach. The inclusion of a NetEase representative within the Machinery of France’s cultural funding apparatus, is a matter of public record.

This raises an obvious, if inconvenient question. If the stated goal of the CNC is to cultivate domestic talent and strengthen national cultural production, then on what basis is a figure aligned with a foreign mega corporation invited to shape those outcomes? Is just a formal French citizenship sufficient to qualify one as a steward of French cultural interest? Or are we witnessing yet another iteration of economic globalism cloaked in the language of national policy?

The tension becomes more evident when we observe the CNC’s outward gestures, not only toward global capital, but also toward geopolitical alignment. Among its recent initiatives, is a public statement of support for Ukraine.

So, what’s the cultural mandate here? What specific French interest is being served by the CNC’s geopolitical declarations? In aligning with international narratives of solidarity, the CNC has revealed itself as less a patron of the arts and more an instrument of soft power.

And yes, this ideological blending is mirrored in the narrative constructed around the story of Expedition 33 itself.

Sandfall Interactive

According to the official story, widely circulated in media and developer interviews, Expedition 33 began as a humble endeavor: a skeleton crew of three swelling to thirty, driven by an ex-Ubisoft developer seeking liberation from corporate constraint. The truth, however, is that even entry-level roles in the indie space often require years of experience. This is why, when you closely examine the profiles of key team members, the whole myth of outsider nipping at the heels of industry professionals begins to erode.

This is how one can understand why someone like Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, whose only claim to fame was that she was a volunteer voice actor, somehow becomes the lead writer, voice director, and (supposedly) the inspiration for the character Luna.

Guillaume Broche, the game’s creative lead, does not hail from the Indie scene either. His resume is steeped in market strategy and it boasts a history of brand development roles, including prior experience in Shanghai during his tenure at Ubisoft.

The language of brand development, often mistaken as a creative or secondary function, is in fact deeply executive. As scholars of marketing note, branding is not just a cosmetic layer your throw on a product. Branding is the architecture of identity itself. To develop a brand is to define what a product is, not merely how it is seen.

Guillaume Broche is the front-facing CEO of Sandfall Interactive. Essentially, he was the man anointed to bring Expedition 33 to life. On the surface, Broche is the picture of modern indie genius, but dig a little deeper and his family portfolio looks less like a bootstrap story and more like a trust‑fund starter pack.

Guillaume Broche is the son of Richard Broche, a man with his fingers in four highly profitable pies: MBO Plus Investments, SCI Magar Real Estate, SC Brooch, and Myrte Invest.

Myrte Invest is the Broche family vehicle. This means Guillaume Broche didn’t claw his way up from QA testing in some dingy Montreal basement. No, he started his career at the top: as an Assistant Creative Director at Ubisoft.

This is really what people need to think about when the word “Indie” is thrown around because what we’re looking at here is a well-connected heir with limited frontline experience who somehow assembled the budget and manpower to produce a video game with near-AAA production quality all under the banner of being a scrappy upstart.

If you look at Sandfall’s 2023 accounts, let the record show €2.7 million euro in debt owed to an unnamed entity. I’ll let you decide who’s footing that bill, but something tells me it wasn’t Kepler Interactive writing blank checks for the love of art.

You can find financial data for Sandfall Interactive from French corporate registries and business intelligence platforms such as Pappers, North Data, and the Annuaire des Entreprises. These sources compile official filings from France’s commercial court system (RCS) and INSEE, the national statistics bureau.

Note, the figures suggest increased operational strain in 2023, with deeper negative working capital and a widening net loss. The company also opted for partial confidentiality, a legal provision in France for firms below certain financial thresholds.

Now, to be perfectly clear, there’s no smoking gun that definitively proves the Broch family fortune was poured directly into the veins of Expedition 33. I don’t have bank statements or a leaked pitch deck with “Dad’s Money” scribbled in the margins. All I have is a constellation of circumstantial facts that, when viewed together, makes it rather difficult to believe that absolutely no help came from the Brosche financial ecosystem. Contrary to myth surrounding Expedition 33, you don’t launch near-AAA debuts with a handshake in a dream--at least not without someone somewhere holding the bag. So, let’s stop pretending that this project was built on ramen noodles and bootstrap grit.

Globo-Homo

Expedition 33 is a calculated synthesis of indie aesthetics and global market sensibilities. Its genre classification, voice direction, narrative structure, and funding apparatus were all shaped by forces that transcend national boundaries, even as they are publicly framed as domestically driven. Public funds underwrote the project, which means the game owes its success to people whose ultimate loyalties are found in the global flows of capital.

Diversity was and still is king among stated ethical framework and corporate mission statements, presented as normative due a commitment to a vision of France not as a bounded national polity, but as an open international space. Diversity is the sacramental sign of the modern social imaginary, one in which identity is no longer tethered to national heritage but outsider inclusivity.

This also illuminates the case of Warhorse Studios, long celebrated as an independent developer committed to historical fidelity and narrative integrity. Independence, as it turns out, is a fragile ideal under the sovereignty of global capital. For Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, the inclusion of homosexual sodomy and of Musa of Mali were framed as “artistic” choices, but ultimately cannot be understood apart from the unspoken catechism of investor mandates and global market expectations.

The point is, the supposed freedom of these studios reveals itself to be a highly curated performance of autonomy. Moreover, a translated interview with Daniel Vavra suggests that the pressures of funding and corporate alignment proved more determinative than any declared creative vision.

Independence in this case is not the absence of constraint, but the internalization of a new orthodoxy, one shaped less by artistic conviction than by the liturgical demands of global capital

JRPG as Branding

In the age of digital fandom and algorithmically-tailored content, it is tempting to believe that genre identity emerges organically, shaped from the grassroots by player communities, content creators, and a consensual cultural osmosis. But a video game genre is often not so much discovered as assigned.

The decision to brand Expedition 33 as a JRPG, for example, did not spring from fan consensus or the collective murmurs on Reddit. In fact, Guillaume Broche, serving as brand development manager at Sandfall Interactive, made the promotion.

In a candid post to Reddit, Broche explained, “Our demo is almost complete. What we lack are the cutscenes being made right now and some voices behind our characters. The game is a 3D modern take on the JRPG genre with westernstyle characters developed on Unreal Engine 4. The game will be heavy on narration, so voices are very important to us.”

There’s no ambiguity here. The JRPG label was not a retrospective classification, but a forwardfacing branding decision made even before the game’s completion. Hell, even before its voice cast was assembled or players had any say in what it even felt like to play.

This is worth noting because it means Expedition 33 is a JRPG not because it organically resembles one but because it has been presented as one. In other words, his calling it a JRPG was purely a marketing tactic, poisoning the well of discourse surrounding the game’s conception.

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen

If you’re tied to new articles and journals in the Western digital space, you’ll find that Jennifer Svedberg-Yen is one of the most elusive people involved in the development of Expedition 33. The most you’ll find is she is a leader writer and voice director, with Expedition 33 being the only project she is credited on.

However, in a Taiwanese interview, which was archived on GNN, she introduces herself as an overseas Chinese person born and raised in the United States with parents from Taiwan:

I focus on the narrative part, which includes story, world building, and characters. This later expanded into directing dubbing, including English and French dubbing, and localizing the game into 11 languages, including traditional Chinese.

What we have here is a profile that extends beyond a set of skills, but has been curated specifically to cross linguistic, geographic, and cultural boundaries. As has been repeatedly stated, Expedition 33 runs off global capital and that is keenly reflected by Svedberg-Yen’s very presence.

Note that Svedberg-Yen joined the team in 2020, before the formal founding of the studio, which suggests her presence is foundational. Moreover, if we read the final third of the GNN article, we see that Svedberg-Yen reflects on the team’s lack of traditional game development experience:

We are a young team. Many of us are getting into gaming for the first time. I have been an investor for most of my life. I am a private equity investor and previously worked in Hong Kong.

Once again, we see behind the myth of the indie game scene is a world shaped by the logics of finance. What is being framed as creative naivety (i.e. “we’re still trying to figure out the answers”) is in fact a different form of expertise: private equity, cross-border investment, and portfolio diversification. This is a team of technocrats entering the narrative space from adjacent sectors of capital.

The ultimate takeaway here is that Expedition 33 is a case study on how almost every aspect of a modern video game (including its developers) is reappropriated for market positioning. Hence, Sandfall hires a multilingual investor to write and direct voice acting while Guillaume Broche signals “JRPG.” These are all branding strategies rooted in the structural incentives of globalized entertainment markets. The whole “indie” identity is just another distraction from the institutional forces at work behind the veil: financiers, investment officers, and marketers.

Networking is Key

The ironic reality about the video games industry is that, despite the adherence to inclusivity, entering the inner sanctum from the outside is no trivial feat. Many an aspiring developer who has tried can attest that, despite the rhetoric that anyone can make games, the reality is that entry often requires networking.

Go to Moby Games and look at the credits of Expedition 33. There, a litany of special thanks that greets the attentive reader: Sloclap, Tactical Adventures, Ebb Software of Scorn Fame, and so on. What are these if not indicators of a production pipeline that is far from self-contained? For a studio of just 30 developers, this list speaks volumes.

Most firms listed are confined to the technical periphery such as testing, porting, and engine support. But look deeper into Tactical Adventures and what we find is not merely a vendor, but a spiritual sibling to Expedition 33. Its board includes Sébastien Tasserie, the same figure whose role in the CNC selection panel we have already noted.

Networking is one of those insanely complex aspects about any industry and equally as frustrating to address in conversation because, the moment you start making connections, people get all uppity and are overeager to say you’re ascribing conspiracy theories to what is, essentially, public record. This is why, upon the release of Expedition 33, nobody ever addresses any networks of affiliation. Instead, all we get is the gloss of celebration, including a coordinated chorus from online influencers, to journalists to...the president of France himself?!

Indeed, even Emmanuel Macron declared Expedition 33 a triumph!

But why isn’t this praise directed at something specific like the game’s mechanics or in the complexities of its writing? Instead, it all drifts into abstraction. We are told again and again about vague notions of “passion” or the nobility of the small indie team and their courage to innovate or their willingness to dream. All of this stuff is just fluff marketing, made to paint a picture that is far brighter than what the game actually represents: Hype and sunk cost.

Pirat_Nation

The word “Indie” has become more than marketing credential, it has become one of many rhetorical devices that absolves a product from any scrutiny. And this elusiveness doesn’t just emerge organically from fans and critics who are motivated by their own enthusiasm. Media, as many of you already suspect, does not operate in a vacuum.

If you want to understand the mechanisms of legitimacy in today’s industry, you don’t start with the official statements. You start with the distribution lists. Industry officials do not need to lie to you, they need only needs to circulate the same few stories through enough mouths that it begins to sound like common sense.

This brings us to the phenomenon known as Pirat_Nation, an X account operating at the intersection of gaming news, political commentary, emulation advocacy, and low-effort shit posting.

With a follower count of nearly 200,000, the presence of Pirat_Nation looms large across multiple digital ecosystems. Pirat_Nation is frequently cited in online forums and Discord servers as some kind of a legitimate source of both information and culture. Yet, this a reputation has not been entirely earned.

The methodology of Pirate_Nation is deceptively simple. The account screenshots news headlines that are often cropped just enough to obscure any citation of an author or outlet. Pirat_Nation hardly ever provides links or context or any path back to the origin of anything posted. Therefore, astroturfing ensues.

What Pirat_Nation does is a deliberate method of traffic sequestration, an information siphoning operation where the X account presents curated information flows as though they were organic grassroots engagement. Supplementing this technique are what appear to be auxiliary accounts (sock puppets) on websites such as 4chan that echo, reinforce, and normalize particular talking points. This creates the illusion of consensus by staging applause.

The opinions voiced by Pirat_Nation are made to appear as though they are coming from a movement that is conveniently aligned with certain ideological vectors. The mask slips, however, when Pirat_Nation performs as a devotee of Japanese culture, including anime aesthetics, nationalist tropes, and the occasional samurai meme. This admiration is curiously brittle and collapses whenever Japanese cultural actors express views or produce media that is out of sync with the supposed worldview of Pirat_Nation. Contrast this with coverage of Chinese and Korean corporations who receive conspicuously gentler treatment from Pirat_Nation.

This bias signals something deeper about how online culture war positions are brokered through algorithmic loyalty, not cultural coherence. This is what is commonly recognized as grift. Grift is all about selecting vectors of engagement that optimize attention, regardless as to what the user actually believes in. What matters in the long run is the currency of attention. Pirat_Nation also follows larger influencers while selectively extracting from them in a parasitic strategy for attention.

Yes, the “based” takes you think are coming from your favorite X account are nothing more than someone who has learned the lingo and knows exactly what pass phrases they need to say or what memes they need to post for you to repost as engagement.

Let’s do a little math here. Below is a comparative snapshot of engagement rates across several prominent X profiles measured by average comments per post relative to total followers:

As you can see, Pirat_Nation’s engagement sits at roughly 2.5 times lower than the baseline one would expect given the size and overlap of the X account’s audience. This is despite the fact that Pirat_Nation shares similar internet territory with these figures, often echoing their talking points and even performing algorithmic proximity theater through reposting, replying, and shadowing.

Despite all efforts of Pirat_Nation to weave itself into the same digital ecosystem as these other accounts, the actual community interaction among Pirat_Nation followers remains conspicuously anemic. Moreover, Pirat_Nation enjoys a surprisingly large following on Blue Sky, a platform on which the account contributes virtually no effort.

The numbers here suggest something odd: the audience for Pirat_Nation follows the account automatically without prompting and without friction, as if by instinct or coordination.

And now enter the leakers. Among the founding members of Pirat_Nation’s Discord server are several figures frequently cited by games media as sources: Doodle, Matfasio, and Visceral. These people are not anonymous forum dwellers, they are serial data miners and self-styled industry insiders. Most are associated with a loosely defined collective known as Team XOX Leak, a name that appears with regularity in coverage by IGN, Eurogamer, Insider Gaming, and similar outlets.

Doodle identifies himself as someone who has broken gameplay leaks for multiple major titles. Mattfasio describes himself as a professional data collector. Visceral maintains a portfolio of featured leaks and even advertises himself as available for contact should you be in the market for embargo breaches. All these people function as some kind of a shadow press corps which has filled the vacuum left by understaffed publications and they all operate with a kind of mythic veneer.

The myth is functional insofar as it benefits official journalists who rely on leakers and dataminers to bridge content gaps (topics your audience is actively searching for but your content doesn’t address.) This, in turn, benefits the leakers who gain influence, clout, and sometimes material reward.

For all the idealism attached to leaking or insider information, one must also of course consider the marketing utility of a well-timed breach. Leaks are rarely accidental and often function as early release trailers for a product in a marketing sense. If a leak has not been orchestrated directly, it is at least permitted to remain in digital space as it serves as a test for market appetite.

Moreover, nobody seems to question whether a “leak” is what its name even indicates because the public enjoys the idea of some kind of industry rebellion going on within these corporations. Think of this like QAnon for gamers. This is all about social engineering, meanwhile the corporations are continually reassessing the pulse of consumer engagement. So, while Pirat_Nation might first appear to be the presence of a grassroots movement in digital space, the account is nothing more than a clever distribution network.

Now, consider the unusually strong performance of Expedition 33 in East Asian markets. The reason for this is because the country of France holds an enduring allure in Japan, Korea, and throughout China. France is an aesthetic ideal wrapped in notions of elegance, art, and cultivated mystique. The Japanese even have a term for the emotional dissonance that can result when fantasy collides with reality: Paris Syndrome.

Western luxury signals prestige for many throughout East Asia. French aesthetics, architecture, fashion, and culinary motifs all carry aspirational weight, especially among China’s rising middle class. This is what gives rise to phenomena like “white monkey jobs” where white foreigners are paid simply to embody “westerness” in ads or events.

This is a interesting look at non-Western ideals regarding diversity. For many middle class East Asians, Western exoticism has become a market feature. Naturally, knowing this means that one has the correct ammunition necessary to penetrate the Chinese market.

Now, we should grant that the Western mind is incredibly naive when it comes to how any market other than the Free Market operates. The kind of market appeal we are told Expedition 33 has is not natural, but that is difficult to explain for people who believe that anything they see as “popular” could only have become that way organically. In reality, Expedition 33 is a case study in how prone the Western market is to falling for something purposely curated for appeal. In essence, we are being mentally conditioned to think about the market as the Chinese do.

Needless to say, China does not operate by free market principles. If we take a look at Tencent, we see that the company has at least 7,915 confirmed members of the Chinese Communist Party embedded within its workforce. Its CCP committee is subdivided into 12 general branches, 116 local units, and nearly 100 internal CCP liaison. These are not employees in the traditional sense, they are ideological officers. Their oversight is infrastructural to the Chinese market. So, why not extend this logic to Expedition 33? The game has a clear France-o-phile appeal with quiet links to Chinese-adjacent funding structures (NetEase) and a distribution pathway to Chinese platforms.

China’s ongoing effort to poach international talent is also well documented. Developers are incentivized with better pay, clearer hierarchies, and an explicit absence of what corporate recruiters sometimes euphemize as “cultural volatility.” Diversity mandates are minimal and political controversy is also discouraged. The objective, ostensibly, is creative output that is optimized for global consumption, but also made domestically legible.

How much more evidence does one need to see that the success of Expedition 33 is less a Cinderella story and more a coordinated globo-homo operation? The game is a result of an elegant collaboration between state-adjacent capital, carefully curated aesthetics, an algorithmically guided influence networks like Pirat_Nation.

Yes, Pirat_Nation, among other social media influencers, plays a key role in the network configuration. And there is a term for this role in Chinese internet slang: Wumao.

Conclusion

Given the current shape of things in the industry, this is the play. Developers and other industry professional are not noble people proceeding under the banner of some grandiose artistic cause. What the industry has become is a factory of efficiency.

When Expedition 33 was released, so many talking points were repeated without critical thought:

“Wow, a French JRPG!”

“Only $50 for a game like this?! Incredible value!”

“An indie game with near-AAA quality? Amazing!”

These were sentiments echoed, amplified, and meme’d across every platform like gospel.

Speaking of the price point, that too wasn’t the result of some master stroke in production logistics or revelation in lean indie game budgeting. What is far more likely is a subsidy disguised as price suppression. Someone somewhere is footing the difference in price between Expedition 33 and the regular slough of AAA slop.

Something also worth noting: China’s border policy, famously rigid when it comes to importing foreign influence or undesirable ideas, has always been markedly indifferent when things flow outward. Be it counterfeit goods, unvetted capital, or global pandemics, what exits the country is of considerably less concern than what enters it. Money, in this case, leaves no fingerprint on the way out, just opportunity.

So ask yourself, how does a small studio like Sandfall Interactive, without a single shipped title to its name, find itself backed by international financiers, endorsed by media giants, flanked by data miners, graced with pre-released Hollywood interest, and praised by Emanuel Macron himself? How does that trajectory square with the hundreds of other small but passionate teams who have collapsed in obscurity despite working twice as hard? Does this look like an indie studio to you? Or does it look like a carefully cultivated asset wrapped in indie aesthetics?

Many times a talented but naive creator gets sold a road map to success. They’re told to follow the rules, keep their head down, check the boxes, and stay authentic. And, of course, the developer builds, polishes, obeys. Development proceeds, years pass, but when his game finally launches, hardly anyone buys it. Meanwhile, everyone who once praised this discipline have vanished into an algorithm of fractured communities.

If you’re an aspiring video game developer, know that it is not enough to say “just work hard” or “be passionate” or “don’t give up.” Because what is actually required is far colder: insight, leverage, and a ruthless resistance to illusion. If you’ve read this entire article, you know the true path forward is not a door, but a brick wall. The successes of those within the highest echelons of media production are not based on merit or artistic acumen nor even ambition, but through deception, manipulation, and cowardice.

Gaming is dead.

NEXT: Amazon Games Confirms ‘Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis’ Is A “True Reimagining” Of The Original Tomb Raider