Plus most news and media companies these days are owned by larger conglomerates that may wish to expand into the Chinese market as well and may not wish to poke the bear.

For all the talk of "a company cannot afford not to do business with the PRC", there ARE some who actually take the high road.

Somaliland may be a tiny, self-declared country, but its president refused to bow down to the PRC's blackmail./

When an exhibition had to be cancelled because the PRC wanted to rewrite history, this french museum was not afraid to use the word 'censorship'/ ('censure'). Heck, they did not invoke the specter of "many visitors" to justify themselves. They pointed the finger toward the "chinese central authoities" ("autorités centrales chinoises"). Here's an english article on the subject.

But what has the self-proclaimed "Truly gamer friendly DRM-free online gaming platform" come up with? A lie and some heavy-duty stonewalling.

Technically, it has an impact if you are an international business.

The museum you are referring to seems to be very local in scope. They won't care all that much if China boycotts them. So they had to cancel a single exhibition... big deal.

That would be like me opening a restaurant across the street and getting banned in another country... unless I franchise out internationally, who cares?

(Whether it is "very local" or not is up for debate, but that's irrelevant here.)

Big deal? Think again. If that exhibition is neglectible, then why does the PRC care about it, to the point of pressuring the organisers? And that, even though Chinese tourists in France are hardly the most likely to visit museums (provided they venture outside Paris). So no, your argument does not stand.

Compared to the running costs of a single museum, the global economic impact of Devotion is small beer. Aaand yet, here we are, with Gog playing dead because of "many gamers".

Many major gaming sites and huge youtubers covered the story when GOG first banned Devotion.

The gaming sites contacted GOG and got no response, and put a disclaimer in their articles that said: "we will update this article if GOG responds"...which they didn't... even though the implication of the articles was that they would.

However, the games journalists have not been following up on the story.

The reason why CDPR recently apologized for Cyberpunk and gave some warm words speeches about it is because of the continual public pressure on them regarding that debacle.

But in contrast, GOG's strategy of completely ignoring the Devotion debacle seems to be working, tragically, since there is not that much public pressure being applied to them at the moment in regards to that.

At least they are still losing many sales from the customers and potential customers who they alienated, though.

But if a large group of GOG customers were to contact games journalists and ask them please to follow up on the story and get real answers as to why GOG banned the game, and why GOG lied about the reason, and why they won't address the controversy...then maybe the journalists would follow up after they realize lots of GOG customers are still very unhappy about this and in need of answers.

If Gus Fring says no, then it's really no.

Muse Bihi Abdi does look a bit like Giancarlo Esposito.But I would say that the ressemblance between Xi Jinping & Winnie the Pooh is even more striking. ;)

Damn. Pooh probably is really depressed for being compared with a communist dictator who fucks his own people every single day.

Let's be real. That dude only cares about exploiting drama around hot button topics in the gaming community. Reality is, JS didn't really bring anything new to light, it's just him harping on about things that have been known. Like yes, the game was rushed, yes the devs were crunched. "Oh my coworkers are speaking their native language instead of my native language! REEEEE" Give me a break on that one. Truth is, Devotion story is much more interesting and probably much more damning to CDP's image, but he doesn't care about it because it won't give him nearly as much attention as regurgitating Cyberpunk talking points with relatively no new info.

Edit: He is also far from being fair. If he did look into it and found the reasoning for removing Devotion was something small, innocent and with no one actually at fault, he wouldn't report on it. He gets alot of credit for "exposing the seedy underbelly" of gaming, but at the end of the day, he is little more than a glorified Jim Sterling who has better sources. No interest on reporting fairly, just feed on negativity from the "gamers" he looks down on.

Be that as it may, emailing/tweeting Schreier about this issue might still yield some interesting results. Gog is content in giving us the silent treatment, so we should leave no avenue unexplored in order to get answers out of them.

Well unfortunatelly if you look around the world (you likely don't have to look far, maybe just a mall, or even same street neighbours) majority of people that are around alive atm value convenience (not working / terribly glitching for a lot of people, game) over privacy (literal censorship enticement).
People's priorities are kind of twisted nowadays.

You can see confirmation of the above in pretty much almost any consumer-grade-equipment related (I am explicitly not saying IT) area.
People don't seem to care how much telemetry their systems or phones have, how much social media sites gather about their lives and what is done with that data.
Close to nobody cares and out of those who care most don't have enough vocality or courage for things to change.

There is also one very big (that could be an understatement of the century) problem:
People wordwide, in general history but especially now, tend to go by "if majority does that then it must be ok to do so" as in "if majority does that then it must surely mean it's not wrong".

It's a huge problem that is ludicrously painful to even try to fight.
It applies to basically EVERYTHING, addictable substances, misuse of technology, social interactions and standards (or lack thereof), lack of moral code, lack of self restraint, pushing people to do things, and countless many other things.
As well as for example "I am not going to move my finger a milimiter to fix the ongoing problem since majority doesn't care and I would have to get out of my comfort zone (convenience) to actually make a change". People aren't courageous these days. Majority simply doesn't care and just follows the mainstream whatever it may be.
Most people are also perfectly trickable into thinking things. It's amusing how easy it is to make a bunch of people change their way of perceiving this world just if you can bring their attention (and it really doesn't matter if what you are saying makes any sense and if it's right or wrong).
Unfortunatelly majority of world population cannot be bothered to even fact check things and they just blidnly believe whatever people say.
And since we have worldwide epidemic of idiocy, well, dumb majority can outscream sane minority in MANY cases.

Also the "size" argument doesn't really matter. Sure, the game doesn't get much publicity either way.
But it really doesn't matter how big or small studio behind it is. PR is such a "wonderful" thing allowing influencers to leverage "loud speech" to promote or utterly destroy things.
We live in a world where people CHOOSE to openly ignore facts and instead listen to what "famouns" / "popular" people lie about.
So if GOG will say some BS then MANY people will still believe it.
And if GOG stays silent about THE problem many people will eventually forget and move on.

Depends on your target demographic?
Like, for example, if by any chance your restaurant would be targetting mostly people from said country, or if you would happen to open it in said-country-citizens congested area.
So this isn't the best example.
But the premise I get from you is this: you should not try to please just one country if you are international company making business with a whole plethora of worldwide personas. Correct?

Well I guess the museum case is all about risk assessment of POTENTIAL publicity.
I am not going to call out if people picking these "places to censor" are idiots or if they can just afford to throw money at their desires indefinitely. But I guess since these days museums are frequented mostly by foreign tourists in most cases (I think this applies to any given country's museums, tho if I'm wrong feel free to correct me) there is a possibility for "wide area chain reaction" even in a small facility out of pure statistical chance (unlikely but possible, by chain reaction I mean a bunch of foreigners from different countries coming to same "undesired" conclusions and then spreading these in their home countries and then you get the chain continuing, I think you should get the idea).

Today is Winnie the Pooh Day!

Something that barely anyone touched upon: Isn't it amazing how every single time gog is handed a rare opportunity that would give them the upper hand over their competitors on a silver platter, they go ahead and find a way to fuck it up?

Similar thing happened with Hatred. Some Valve employee kicked the game from the storefront, devs said "Fuck it, we'll release on gog!" For a brief moment, gog were the heroes and Steam looked like censorious assholes. Then gog chickened out while Gaben himself welcomed the game back on Steam, which reversed the situation and made Steam look like heroes and gog like utter cowards. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory truly is the gog way.

Without foreign tourists, french museums would either go belly up or tighten up their belt by a couple of notches. But unless you're the Louvre, asian tourists have little to no impact. The United Kingdom leaving the EU will have more of an effect, but that will still be manageable.

As for a chain reaction, the PRC doesn't have enough soft power to spread that abroad, and as I've said, they don't weigh enough to make any sizeable difference whatsoever outside Paris.

Which leads to an interesting question: how large is the PRC's share in Gog's revenues?

The situation was different, there never was any indication that Gog was ever willing to release the game on their platform, which is understandable given that, even without the controversy, when it was first released Hatred was a buggy mess.

You cannot really say they chicken out, refusing to sell a game despite the devs wanting to sell it here is something that Gog does on a regular basis even without any controversies attached to it.