Leaving China
Since 2018, we began releasing software in China under the name GROUP900.
During this process, our ideas and goals changed somewhat compared to when we started. However, we ultimately discovered that operating a small studio in China might be a losing proposition.
In our last year in China, we developed a cocktail app called "调了个酒".
Although it's now 2024, due to China's firewall policies, we are unable to use better services from other countries.
If you want to operate software with network functionality in China, you must choose cloud services provided by Chinese companies (Alibaba, Tencent), which is both a technical and policy limitation.
To keep the service running long-term while reducing support, we used Cloudflare Workers to provide the entire "调了个酒" software service. However, all network requests had to be processed through Cloudflare's Hong Kong node, which was extremely slow. Cloudflare is not allowed to set up network nodes within China, mainly to protect the interests for Chinese cloud service companies.
Even if users can tolerate longer network requests, you still need to purchase domain names from Chinese cloud service companies and register them with government departments. Your services must also be provided through servers of Chinese companies. We had to purchase servers within China to relay Cloudflare Workers services, which made the speed even slower.
Moreover, these policies are becoming stricter due to conflicts between countries. Now, not only domain names need to be registered, each new app also needs to be reported to government departments. This is even stricter for games - if you don't have a publication number issued by a Chinese publisher (every publisher in Chinese belongs to the government), your game must be free. Games without a publication number that charge or have in-app purchases are prohibited from being listed.
We couldn't be certain whether Cloudflare would be blocked one day(the reason that Cloudflare is not blocked is mainly because Chinese government still need cf). And due to network restrictions, our services were very inefficient. So we have to shut down all products related to "调了个酒".
I found that we were spending too much time dealing with policies, and these policies are not open enough. In medium to large Chinese companies, there are some experienced specialists who deal with these issues. Overall, we couldn't continue to run our studio as a Chinese company under such restrictions. We couldn't quickly decide which software could support our continued operation, we couldn't access some affordable and better quality basic services, and we couldn't (or it was impossible to) generate income through game development. We ended our operations in China in 2023.
New Base
Unexpectedly, I got the opportunity to live in Manila last year.
After a period of recovery, we decided to restart designing and developing software in Manila.
Language is sometimes a difficult barrier to overcome. Transitioning from Chinese to English is a primary issue, but we will strive to overcome this problem and develop new products more in an English-speaking environment.
and Chinese is actually used in some other countries or regions (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore), we will try to continue providing Chinese-language-based software to these countries and regions.
Although this means that our past innovations and efforts within China have gone up in smoke, I am still happy and excited that we have finally crossed national limitations and are ready to continue creating in a broader world.
GROUP900 will continue to develop more innovative and practical software, and provide services to countries worldwide (except China Mainland).