Why the Creator of 'ICEY 2' Is Begging China's Gamers to Stop Donating

The crowdfunding page went up on October 1, the tenth anniversary of the action game ICEY's release, with a target set deliberately at 10,000 yuan — a token figure for what its maker described as a launch "purely for fun." Within a day it had passed four million yuan. Weibo posts on October 2 tracked it past 11 million, then 13.4 million; by the time the story hit the front page of Zhihu's trending board, the total had crossed 20 million — two thousand times the goal, and by a margin no Chinese indie game has ever approached.

The producer, known to players as "Old Ma" (老马), spent the week on livestream looking less like a man who had won something than like a man being buried. Hands pressed together, expression pained, he repeated one sentence across the streams: "I'm never crowdfunding again in my life — once this one ends, I'm begging you" (我这辈子都不众筹了，这次结束我求你们了). If he had known how many people would take part, he said, he would have set the whole thing up as a two-day pre-sale instead. At one point he kowtowed to the camera. The plea that travelled furthest was also the shortest: please do not "make a god" (造神) of this game.

What the money looks like, on the page itself, is a column of zeros that refuses to stop growing: a screenshot circulating on Weibo shows 11,863,028.62 yuan pledged against the 10,000-yuan target, from more than 86,900 backers, with more than a month of the campaign still to run. The game it funds, ICEY: Continued, is the sequel to a 2D side-scrolling action game that became a standard-bearer of China's indie wave a decade ago — small-studio proof, in its day, that a domestic team could make something players treated as their own. The sequel is pinned for a Steam release on May 1, 2027.

The reason the crowdfunding became a national talking point, though, is that Old Ma's panic is legible to everyone watching. Chinese players have spent recent years in a mood of deliberate support for domestic games — buying, rating and defending them as a statement — and that goodwill has consequences the recipients can feel. A pledge of 86,900 yuan-averaging contributions is also 86,900 sets of expectations, attached to a sequel nobody has played, carrying a title its own maker calls a ten-year promise. On Zhihu, the debate is exactly this: the question trending there asks what to make of a producer kneeling on stream to beg his audience to stop, and the answers divide between pride that China's indie scene can command such sums and worry about what happens to a small team holding them. A crowdfunding record, one answer observed, is also a debt record.

Old Ma has made the same point himself, in so many words, from inside the storm. The version of the campaign he says he would have preferred — a quiet pre-sale for a fixed product — is the version that would not have made news. Instead he is running the most successful crowdfunding drive in Chinese gaming history and asking, on camera, for it to be smaller. The counter, still rising as the holiday ends, has not agreed.