Actually no, I don't remember it ever being on the store. ;)

we dont even know what taiwanese is
is that a province of china like wuhan?

What are you two talking about?
Was there some news I missed?

Well technically between the original announcement and the "cancelation tweet" the game's store product card was live.
So yes, it was in this store for a couple of hours.
Here, proof:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701000000*/www.gog.com/game/devotion
https://web.archive.org/web/20201216100054/www.gog.com/game/devotion

You know, you should mark sarcasm when it is not 100% obvious, otherwise some people will take your words seriously and not be very happy about them.

Wuhan is not a province but a city. It is located in the province Hubei which is north of Hunan.

Interesting! I didn't know they'd made a store page for it and all, but still wouldn't call that "in the store" as it's basically a placeholder. If the game was released and then removed I'd call it removed, as things are I would call it cancelled as the game itself was never available for purchase (not even preorder).
Not that I'm defending GOG, it was still scummy to cancel the release that way. The morons announced the release on Weibo, so of course they got a load of angry Chinese citizens complaining. The CCP wouldn't have had to lift a finger because the citizens did the job for them.

Here I would like to point out one thing I already said in this thread multiple times while it is being casually ignored by many people:
You cannnot legally put product card live without signing a distribution contract with developer/publisher first.
So, technically, GOG broke already signed contract.
In which case they are legally obligated to give actual sound reason for it and any PR talk is a basis to hold them responsible for trying to lie to dev/publisher.

Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Without knowing the exact terms of the contract I think this is wild speculation. They may have broken their word, but we have no reason to assume they broke the contract. Almost any contract has clauses that allow the agreement to be dissolved and we don't know what the terms for this were. GOG may have behaved dishonourably but there's nothing to suggest they did anything illegal.

I've never heard of any law that says that they would need to make any of that public.

I also agree. GOG would provide their own default contract when they agree to publish a game on their store that needs to be authorized by the gamedev / publisher. There will always be a termination clause for breaking agreements in these contracts. Not sure what the terms are, but I don't see why it wouldn't have been invoked during the entire Devotion fiasco. And if they didn't, it wasn't something Red Candle would bother suing GOG over for breaking the contract.

I think this is another example of B1tF1ghter imposing their own industry-specific and/or country-specific work experience directly to GOG's operations again. I mean somewhat helpful to understand what could've happened, but it's all speculation that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Considering how CDPR painted a big ol' bulls eye on their backs with the name for their Chinese censorship flag in Cyberpunk 2077, there's a possibility that gog gets firewall'd until then - so who knows... never say never! ;-P

Actually, whatever GOG says publicly (for example PR, and tweets from official GOG account fall under that) must be on par with official reason * given to dev/publisher for contract cancelation.
If it's not then GOG totally CAN be held legally responsible.

Let's pretend for a sec that what was in the tweet was also the official reason given to devs (if there was a discrepancy between GOG's tweets and official reasoning given to devs through non-public means then GOG is technically under legal fire in at least few different jurisdictions and the devs totally can sue them) - the "we received many messages from gamers" does not hold up legally - it does not provide neccessary details nor proofs.
For instance:
"gamers"? Proof being?
We don't know if these PEOPLE were gamers, we don't even know if they were GOG's customers, if they had GOG accounts before writing it and if so if the accounts' age was sufficient (not within few days/weeks back with a "general trend" between accounts).
We don't know the numbers of those alleged "people". It's neither specified if these reports came from unique IP adresses.
With this "specific" description given by the tweet we don't know if those alleged messages didn't maybe come from just few (if we are even supposed to fall for that "explanation") individuals or maybe even just one.
Also, it's not even proven that those messages came from actual people, it might have all been scripted bots or deep learning based "complaints crafting" AI (it's totally doable from technological standpoint).
How many messages - not specified.
How many "people" - not specified.
What timespan of messages income - not specified.
Complaints delivery method, for example email, support tickets, others - not specified.

When did gross of messages come (timestamp/timespan) - not specified.
If it came after GOG put the product card live - how is it that GOG processed those in just few hours (the hours between the moment product card went live and the moment the "cancelation tweet" was made and subsequently product page went dark) - remember: at the time GOG support pages, as well as GOG's public accounts stated EVERYWHERE that they are "overloaded with support tickets due to reduced amounts of support personnel available due to pandemic". Many individuals on GOG forums and social media pages reported delays counted in days and up.
So either:
- GOG processed this "GREAT NUMBER" of messages from "gamers" in record time, in JUST FEW HOURS, meaning - GOG putting them on some sort of priority over other people's tickets (otherwise how could they possibly process "this many" with "this little manpower" within just few hours on a normal "first come first served" basis - the answer is - they could not)
- or the "many messages" were not so many or none at all

There are simply no other options.

Also, what's notable is that "the tweet" got subsequently removed at some point (personally I am not aware of EXACT timestamp so don't ask me) and is no longer accessible (through twitter itself anyway) as of now.

The tweet gave very vague bizzare reasoning, no details, no specifics, wording used being very multi-meaning leaving a lot of room for interpretation - generally joke level of PR wording skill or perhaps a master level at PR deceit skill.
Subsequently GOG took "radio silence" path.
GOG is consequently ignoring multiple requests for additional info, for example "how many".
Also, GOG is apparently ignoring PROVABLE (vs non-proven from the tweet) messages from ACTUAL GOG users, including wishlist entry that as of time of writing this has over 9000 votes.

People will say differing things about this whole predicament.
Many will casually brush this off.
Some "don't care because it does not involve a game they care about".
Others will blindly defend GOG.

Regardless of all that the actions taken by GOG combined with subsequent total informational blackout is looking incredibly shady and provokes a lot of questions and concerns.

What I am saying is based on the existence of some POLISH law that relates to this directly.
I won't cite you details as I don't have time for digging in profoundly badly designed Polish gov pages while I don't remember how exactly it goes.
But there IS a law that mandates that your reason for breaking a contract with another non-personal entity must be for a good reason, and you need to provide it to the involved entity, it cannot be "oh because we said so", reason must be given, and public PR talk must be on par with it.

* I will give you a direct example on how a company cannot lie in their public statements (including PR as well as all official [example being twitter] accounts):
Doom Eternal devs VS Mick Gordon case.

Oh yeah, btw, this is to you directly (who wrote this):
In the future please refrain from trying to imply that I am "automatically wrong" solely because I sometimes suck at explaining my totally valid points.
You don't even have proofs for that alleged "work experience bias" and the wording you used suggests I was ALWAYS wrong and "it's not the first time happening".
I would appreciate if you would refrain from such bizzare allegations ;)

Are you a lawyer or something? I studied contract law in school too and no one sues over such pedantic details unless there's lots of money to be made or lost. And people don't sue out of principle. Just because someone is liable doesn't mean someone else is going to go ahead and sue them.

We all know "gamers" were the Weibo gamers because it's obvious almost everyone in western countries dislike the Chinese government and their patriots' thin skin. That was heavily implied to everyone who has any bit of common sense.

What on earth are you talking about? I didn't say you were automatically wrong or that you sucked at explaining your "totally valid" points. I'm saying they're valid, but a forewarning to everyone to take it with a grain of salt because you applied your strict interpretation of business law to something we don't know the full details about.

Is it not in this case?
If the deal would not be broken GOG would be exclusive platform selling the game for probably quite some time.
That obviously involves quite some money, even when just counting those who would check the game based solely on viral controversy.

Well I for certain don't know if the "gamers" were even real.
There is no proof for it, with plenty of suggestion otherwise although still not proof.

If you believe they were real and in fact Weibo users, be it gov-related or otherwise - well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

The wording you used was somewhat indicative of what I said.
It wasn't exactly putting me in positive neither neutral light...
Just saying...

Depends if you can quantify the damages. Is it a valid case with a good chance of winning based on historical precedents or will it be thrown out of court? Is it worth the tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees? I guess the 9000+ players who wishlisted it * $20 USD regular price * 0.7 gamedev cut = $126k USD * 3 treble factor = $378k + legal fees would be to start, which isn't that significant when Red Candle can better reinvest any upfront legal costs back into their business for other games instead. It depends on the wording of the contract under termination clauses, where they'll be sued (California or EU?), and whether it's worth pursuing. FYI, I'm not defending GOG here.

There's feigning ignorance for some coin and then there's feigning ignorance to be pedantic or to force someone's hand. If they're not Western gamers, who else can it be? Do you think government censor officers would be subscribed to some small niche gaming platform's news feeds? By deduction, it's Chinese gamers who shared it and piled on the attacks. Don't need censorship officers either if a great deal of the population have already been indoctrinated by their pro-nationalistic education and upbringing. Not sarcasm: if you ask me, I think your skills are better served in law instead of IT if you're very particular about wording all the time.

Even that is a loaded question, as "who" assumes that they are real people, and "gamers" assumes that they are real gamers.

Alternatives for who or what it could be:

a) no one and nothing at all: the entire statement could have been a total fabrication on GOG's part

b) non-human bots

c) government agents

Moreover, we don't know what "many" means either. That could mean three or four, in the event that there is some small modicum of truth to GOG's nonsense statement (which there may well not be).

Thank you for the alternatives. Why do you think this is a loaded question? Let's discuss your points. How does GOG benefit from being embroiled in controversy? They should've already learned from their previous social media gaffes (e.g., 2010's death, 2018's #WontBeErased). And it makes zero sense for them to spend resources to test Red Candle's build, pass the curation process, and review and send out a contract just to pull it hours before it goes live. Therefore, I don't think this is likely and can rule out GOG conspiring in some way to benefit out of all this. Yeah, they could be. But even here on GOG, it's easy to tell who is a bot and who isn't. But wouldn't put it past people to not go through the profiles of each account to determine if they're a bot or not. It's usually a waste of time. I have no idea why esteemed and expensive government officers would be browsing social media all day. Would be easier for Sina Weibo developers to either develop their own autocensor tools to catch low hanging fruit like this BBC article (2013) suggests and/or outsource it to a third-party moderation company (similar to Facebook and Cognizant). Looking at past posts, Turbo-Beaver's thoughts sounds the most reasonable to me.

If 20.2% of CP2077 copies were sold in Asia and China represents 52% of the global video game industry, then 10.5% of CP2077's sales came from China. If 13 million copies of CP20777 were sold globally, then 1.37 million copies were sold in China. When you compare a potential ~$126k USD in Devotion sales versus 1.37 million * $40 USD/copy * ~0.60 rough approx total cut = $33 million USD revenue from China, it's easy to see which decision made more economic sense. And these calculations are after the fact. Before this fiasco, Devotion only had 67 votes before it was pulled. This does assume a false dichotomy of having to choose between preserving CP2077 sales or keeping Devotion on GOG, though.