Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Under the Gun
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meiam
Posts: 3447 |
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You missed the best (worst) part with blizzard, they also fired both caster interviewing him just because they were present.
Someone made a good point about this, it's somewhat reasonable for blizzard to try and stop player from making political declaration in post match interview since they don't want this to happen everytime. But they went wayyyyyyy overboard. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4612 |
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It turns out the casters knew what was coming going by further coverage. While I don't think they should have been fired, they apparently said to blitzchung that they would stop the feed after he made his statement. Overall, I do think Blizzard went way too far. Yes, their tournament rules allow them to do what they did, and blitzchung has said in later interviews that he expected as much, but the actual rule he violated is incredibly broad and allows Blizzard to be as arbitrary as they want with it. It's worrying that a company would be this quick and this severe in its efforts to keep that market open. It's no secret that different versions of movies get sent over already. However, Ubisoft had to backpedal not too long ago with changes it was going to make to Rainbow Six Siege that would have made all versions conform to a version that was approved for China. Ubisoft did decide to have separate versions, but it took customers calling them out for it to make that happen. |
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2340 |
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-Blizzard: Their name has made this ironic because they have put themselves into a perfect storm of discourse. Apparently account deletions have gotten so bad that Blizzard has disabled any ability to do it. Not only that, but Blizzcon is three weeks away, meaning there's a high chance there's going to be even MORE trouble coming.
And this is a problem more and more companies are going to have to deal with. You can't claim to be free speech advocates and then do stuff like what Blizzard did to blitzchung. This is also why I don't think it's any coincidence that Sony has been concerned about sexual content in video games right around the time they're trying to get into the Chinese market. -PS5: The cynic in me says it was no coincidence the announcement came right around the time Sony Europe had layoffs. -Galarian Ponyta: SOOOOOO many plushies. I also like how at the end of the stream they teased the Rapidash with its cry being heard. |
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Themaster20000
 Posts: 870 |
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This whole thing with Blizzard and the NBA,just remind you that corporations only care about social justice,as long as it doesn't affect their bottom line. I'm honestly not shocked at them being cowards toward China.
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meruru
Posts: 475 |
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It's truly frightening how the Chinese government is trying to suppress free speech abroad using tactics like this. I'm glad that people are protesting what Blizzard has done.
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Hoppy800
 Posts: 3331 |
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This is why I say reject the money from China, it's not worth all of trouble. Just say no.
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Zimmer
Posts: 199 |
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Can't let humanitarian views get in the way of profit.
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2367 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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I honestly only heard about all this because of the South Park episode Band In China. Which resultantly got the show banned in China.
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Rentwo
 Posts: 184 |
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No one's free speech is being suppressed. Blitzchung nor the two casters were not arrested for what they said. They were simply fired and disqualified from the tournament. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. If Blizzard doesn't want to platform their politics or views on their websites or streams they do not have to. People can protest if they want, but it's not going to change anything. A few hundred upset fans or tweets protesting isn't worth breaking a billion dollar market. All the big streamers are still streaming Blizzard games and the numbers for them are still at the top of Twitch. The average consumer doesn't really care about this at all, and like some of streamers have said, all it does is annoy people and push them away, which is why they've banned it in their chats.
There's not really any trouble at all though. People protested Epic Games Store because it's half owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, yet games like Borderlands 3 still broke series records and were popular and EGS has been doing amazingly well despite gamer protests. Same thing we're seeing with Blizzard now. There will be some angry fanboys, but they're inconsequential. There is also the anime industry where most foreign profit comes from the Chinese market and of course there's Hollywood. As far as anime goes I think it's fine. The anime that are popular in China are ones that are popular in Japan and in the west too. So it's just more money for the companies at the end of the day. The only incident that's happened so far is one anime that was seen as anti-Chinese being cancelled in production. |
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meiam
Posts: 3447 |
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[quote="Rentwo"]
"Hey, it's not a problem, except that one time where it was a problem" 
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Engineering Nerd
 Posts: 902 Location: Southern California |
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I was more worry about the Sinophobia that is dominating the social platform, many cannot seem to separate government and actual grassroot people, this is very alarming. The amount of hate speech and blatant racism has crossed the line.
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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China is currently trying to suppress a whole lot more than merely free speech. Technically Blizzard hasn't censored anyone because they aren't a government and can't throw people in jail or engage in police brutality, but they sure went a long way towards supporting a government doing those things. Letting this guy make his statement and just throwing out the old "he does not represent the views of Faceless Conglomacorp" would have been a safer strategy that probably wouldn't have made anyone angry at them. Instead, they managed to turn this into such a scandal that even non-gamer news outlets are talking about it; this banhammer technique could end up being worse for their profits than the alternative. The thing about "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence" is that it cuts both ways. I can't really tell if you're openly supporting Blizzard in this or just promoting a sort of defeatist attitude towards their corporate power... but if it's the latter, you should be aware that there's no real difference between the two in terms of results. |
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steelmirror
 Posts: 342 |
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I'm a Chinese American with family still in China, and I'm as pissed as anyone about the cravenness of the NBA, Blizzard, Apple, and other companies that cave to Chinese government censors because they are afraid of losing their profits. It's apparently easy to champion social progress and freedoms in the West, where by and large consumers reward that kind of messaging, but threaten their bottom line and it very quickly becomes clear that all that virtue signalling was just another form of shrewd marketing.
With that reality as it is (and I'm not surprised by it, just disgusted), it's on those of us who still care about such freedoms and who support the people in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and honestly regular people all over China who suffer from the government's repression. We have to make these companies pay for their cowardice in China by voting with our own dollars, or else the companies will just follow the money and China's repression will stretch a little bit further. |
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Commander Cluck
 Posts: 123 |
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I hope one day we get a regional variant Pokemon that isn't a Kanto Pokemon. Well, we got one.. but I can't wait for the day it's commonly accepted that Pokemon is a perfectly fine game beyond the first generation and, dare I say, actually improved over time.
The Blizzard thing is nothing new and shouldn't be surprising people. People have been encouraging and supporting big companies and media sites to deny people a platform or service based on vague TOS violations or general "public interest values" for the past few years. These people opened the floodgates for this kind of behavior so it seems like they got exactly what they wanted in the end. Although I'm willing to give the Blizzard fanbase the benefit of the doubt and assume most of them don't particuarly care about this and it's just being co-opted by outside people like a lot of outrage movements are. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2340 |
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Pretty much and it's not just Blizzard. As Heidi said, there was a fiasco when the NBA Rockets General Manager was forced to take down a tweet critical of China. Here's the thing: China does not have Twitter, it's not allowed by their government. It was never seen by anyone but the Chinese government officials who clearly did not like being questioned. The reason Disney changed the Ancient One from a Tibetan to a white woman was because of he geopolitical situation regarding Tibet and the Dalai Lama. So it looks like with all this stuff happening, things are getting to an impasse. Companies cannot keep championing "social justice" and kowtow to the Chinese government to keep their bottom line. One side has to give sooner or later. |
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