*P1S* Responds to Debt Controversy: Why Do the Chinese and Japanese Announcements Show Two Different Maps?

Whenever I’m clearing the map in an open world, the situation I dread most is this: the same area comes with two different sets of markers for daytime and nighttime, and only after you walk in do you realize the roads don’t line up at all. Prime 1 Studio, or P1S, and its recent response gave me a strong sense of déjà vu—not because there was too little information, but because the two “maps” were drawn differently.

The starting point of this whole thing is pretty straightforward. Recently, a domestic manufacturer publicly accused P1S of overdue payments and also mentioned that the company was suspected of fraudulently taking goods worth about 1.6 million yuan. P1S then released an official statement responding to the dispute. Normally, with this kind of business conflict, outsiders would wait for more evidence to emerge after seeing the public statements. But looking further down this path, what really ignited public opinion was not just the payment dispute itself, but the clear discrepancies between the Chinese and Japanese announcements.

Some netizens noticed after comparing the two that the Japanese announcement released overseas by P1S contained significantly more information. For example, it mentioned that during this transaction, the factory involved had pressured P1S into signing an “unequal contract,” and P1S claimed it cooperated under duress. In addition, the Japanese version further alleged that the other party had auctioned off statue molds copyrighted by P1S, launched protests against P1S’s China base, and made improper compensation claims, while emphasizing that these actions had already interfered with business operations and damaged its reputation.

But outside that map, the Chinese announcement did not include key wording such as “unequal contract.” And that is exactly where the problem lies. For ordinary onlookers, if two versions are addressing the same matter but one clearly omits core information, the impression it leaves is going to be very poor. It’s hard not to wonder: is this a difference in wording based on different legal environments, or a deliberate attempt to split public opinion?

So the dissatisfaction from netizens is actually easy to understand. Some directly labeled it a case of “two-faced announcements,” believing that P1S was trying to craft different victim narratives for different regions. From the perspective of brand communication, this approach is highly risky. P1S is, after all, a high-end statue brand, and its user base is particularly sensitive to copyright, delivery, after-sales service, and brand credibility. You can explain your position first, but the premise is that both sides should at least be looking at the same base map.

From an industry trend perspective, this kind of inconsistency in cross-regional announcements will only become easier to backfire in the future. The speed at which information now flows among players and collectors is long past the era when segmented regional operations could neatly keep things apart. If you hide part of the explanation in one version today, tomorrow it will be like someone discovering an unmarked side road on Google Maps—very quickly screenshot, compared, and spread across the entire internet.

If you are a P1S customer yourself, at this stage I would recommend waiting and watching, especially when it comes to issues involving pre-orders, delivery, and any follow-up rights protection. Pay closer attention to whether the official side will later unify its messaging, provide additional evidence, or offer a more complete explanation of the transaction. Business disputes can be clarified over time, but brand trust is a different matter—once the map is marked wrong, players may not be willing to walk back in next time.