This theory makes sense: those who played it first played it buggier so rated it worse. Now once has been released worldwide, and specially after releasing bugfixes, the percentages go back to the normality.
Even among Asia, the Chinese review percentage is an extreme outlier being that low.
In my experience, mainland China players are not more likely to review more negatively.
If we look look at the Top sellers Local list for the major countries where Mandarin is the/one official Language we get:
Singapore: #2
Hong Kong: #3
Taiwan: #1
Mainland China: #11
This tells me that something much more regional happened here.
Game fell off hard within 24 hours in only one of those regions.
Most likely that the matchmaking/servers were working even less within that particular region and/or maybe some other localized issue.
This is a bit of a shame, considering the first game had a lot of reviews in Chinese AND China is the largest portion of that particular playing block.
It is also probably the #1 or #2 in terms of Steam yearly revenue worlwide.
Loss of potential here is potentially huge, not only because of people not buying the game but then engaging with future MTX and whatnot.
At the end of the day, it is what it is.
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