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Post edited February 12, 2023 by lace_gardenia
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Mori_Yuki: There is no way for anything to fly below the radar of Chinese tracking. They got surveillance measures in place beyond Orwell's worst nightmares.
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toxicTom: Yeah, is it a bird, or is it a plane? As the Guardian pointed out, GOG used to be too small to care.

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Mori_Yuki: Devotion shouldn't even be a source of conflict anymore. This developer removed content after what happened over at Steam.
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toxicTom: And still the game didn't return. Removing the content and voicing an apology is sometimes not enough. Because it doesn't alter the fact that they did mock the "leader" (and his mother) and that fact won't go away, even if they remove the "evidence". Tension between China and Taiwan have always been high, sometimes at the brink of war, and everybody is on edge. The devs burnt their publisher (also people with wives and kids, anyone ever think about those?) over a silly joke they should have known wouldn't end well in this tense climate. And now it's GOG getting burned.

GOG have by simply announcing the game maneuvered themselves in an impossible position: Publish the game, get kicked out of China (and probably suffer Chinese troll DDoS during CP77-release and a large sale), get CP77 banned over there, and explaining to their shareholders that freedom of art is more important than their money? Or give in, angering their Western customers for appeasing Chinese censorship and lack of humour?

Of course their handling of the situation was abysmal. Of all the lesser evils they picked the biggest one: blame "gamers".
For me it isn't about blaming gamers so much as not even telling the truth of what has actually happened and the reason why they decided to handle things the way they did. The evidence for this has been deleted from Weibo. Even the localized twitter message: Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store. is now gone as are the threats made by gamers.

That there is a political dimension to this can't be denied. But what got this to do with this situation? It was a stupid cartoon bear used as meme, used by Chinese citizens not even to mock their leader, that was too much for officials to accept. Now it is again about this game and whatever there was in it that so angered the official party. It was removed. So why is there still a need to interfere with a European shop by gamers? Why threaten a shop to boycott CP2077 over this? Why should we in the west care what official China thinks about this game? Why do we living in many free eastern and western countries have to care about the sensitivities of a totalitarian Chinese government?

As for GoG? It wasn't like this developer convinced or forced GoG to publish it and GoG had no other choice. They must have been aware of the controversy surrounding the game on Steam as it made its way around news sites and blogs when this happened. What I do see is what happens when someone threatens the company all while they are ignoring wishes and demands of their paying customers. This is GoG's message to me: "We care if someone threatens to boycott us. We simply ignore anyone else and disregard whatever they demand or wish or need."

Relations between China and Taiwan will not get any worse over a game people in the west were about to be able to buy from a European online shop. Other companies bent to pressure put on them to remove content. The infamous video Activision removed and the controversy surrounding it in the west. The cause for their removal of a video clip was because Chinese internet users accused Activision of "exporting ideology" and bringing "politics into videogames." This is about the same as gamers said in a discussion about CP2077 only this time around it's about Taiwan. A point which worries me most. Because of those gamers start alleging things being present in other games and decide to threaten to boycott GoG again, knowing they will give in as they done once over a mere trifle that is Devotion, how is this going to end?

If GoG cares so much about its customers as they do when threatened from a country whose customers don't even get official access it speaks volumes what's going to happen with the next game they don't like or wish to be censored or not added. This and the way I am perceived as a paying customer and the experience of using this website, the store and support is what really matters to me. I made my decision. As long as this isn't sorted out I will not buy here anymore. I don't buy from a company behaving the way they did. This is also why I don't consider GoG's position at all. Why should I care what situation they got themselves into and problems arising from their poor way of handling things when they don't care the least for their customer(s)?

I don't tell anyone to do the same or think the way I do about all this. If others wish to continue buying GoG games it is totally fine with me. It is a personal decision to decide when it's time to draw a line and send a clear message to GoG that this isn't the way to treat paying customers old and new.
Post edited December 18, 2020 by Mori_Yuki
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[deleted]
Post edited February 12, 2023 by lace_gardenia
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kohlrak: ... in pure free-market capitalism you're not legally obligated to seek maximum profit, and that profit is only the primary motivator rather than exclusive motivator.
The ball also isn't legally required to fall to the ground when you let it go.

I don't know where you live, but on this side of the rabbit hole capitalism is still a dog-eat-dog system, where if you don't make profit, or don't make enough profit, you get destroyed.
If you decide not doing business with China, someone less morally inhibited will, and after a while they will use all the profits they made there to crush you. They only way to prevent that would be strong governments prohibiting deals with China, but that's not "free market" any more, and also ever since globalisation became a thing countries are now also "competing". If your government forbids you dealing with China, the competition in the next country opens champagne...
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[deleted]
Post edited February 12, 2023 by lace_gardenia
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Mori_Yuki: There is no way for anything to fly below the radar of Chinese tracking. They got surveillance measures in place beyond Orwell's worst nightmares.
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toxicTom: Yeah, is it a bird, or is it a plane? As the Guardian pointed out, GOG used to be too small to care.

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Mori_Yuki: Devotion shouldn't even be a source of conflict anymore. This developer removed content after what happened over at Steam.
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toxicTom: And still the game didn't return. Removing the content and voicing an apology is sometimes not enough. Because it doesn't alter the fact that they did mock the "leader" (and his mother) and that fact won't go away, even if they remove the "evidence". Tension between China and Taiwan have always been high, sometimes at the brink of war, and everybody is on edge. The devs burnt their publisher (also people with wives and kids, anyone ever think about those?) over a silly joke they should have known wouldn't end well in this tense climate. And now it's GOG getting burned.

GOG have by simply announcing the game maneuvered themselves in an impossible position: Publish the game, get kicked out of China (and probably suffer Chinese troll DDoS during CP77-release and a large sale), get CP77 banned over there, and explaining to their shareholders that freedom of art is more important than their money? Or give in, angering their Western customers for appeasing Chinese censorship and lack of humour?

Of course their handling of the situation was abysmal. Of all the lesser evils they picked the biggest one: blame "gamers".
Fuck any game company that is publicly traded. I don't care if that means only buying 2 games every 5 years. All publicly traded companies are now compromised. None of them can be trusted.
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kohlrak: ... in pure free-market capitalism you're not legally obligated to seek maximum profit, and that profit is only the primary motivator rather than exclusive motivator.
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toxicTom: The ball also isn't legally required to fall to the ground when you let it go.

I don't know where you live, but on this side of the rabbit hole capitalism is still a dog-eat-dog system, where if you don't make profit, or don't make enough profit, you get destroyed.
If you decide not doing business with China, someone less morally inhibited will, and after a while they will use all the profits they made there to crush you. They only way to prevent that would be strong governments prohibiting deals with China, but that's not "free market" any more, and also ever since globalisation became a thing countries are now also "competing". If your government forbids you dealing with China, the competition in the next country opens champagne...
Or drop a moab on the CCP.
Post edited December 18, 2020 by Shiznown
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kohlrak: ... in pure free-market capitalism you're not legally obligated to seek maximum profit, and that profit is only the primary motivator rather than exclusive motivator.
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toxicTom: The ball also isn't legally required to fall to the ground when you let it go.

I don't know where you live, but on this side of the rabbit hole capitalism is still a dog-eat-dog system, where if you don't make profit, or don't make enough profit, you get destroyed.
If you decide not doing business with China, someone less morally inhibited will, and after a while they will use all the profits they made there to crush you. They only way to prevent that would be strong governments prohibiting deals with China, but that's not "free market" any more, and also ever since globalisation became a thing countries are now also "competing". If your government forbids you dealing with China, the competition in the next country opens champagne...
Capitalism was never dog-eat-dog in intention. It was acceptance of that dog-eat-dog mentality that crops up regardless of system. The idea of capitalism is to try to apply to businesses what democracy and republicanism tried to apply to government. Capitalism also allows someone to make "just enough to get by" or "be comfortable." Corporations are fundamentally different, where money is the sole motivator. With raw capitalism, you do fear loosing your base, you do not have "the corporate shield of lawyers," etc. Where i come from, there are businesses that are not corporate, and the owners do really interesting things. The really interesting ones are the franchises like McDonalds or car dealerships, where you have a little of both worlds (still not necessarily the best of both). Unfortunately, these (the hybridized franchises and the non-corporate stores) are not particularly large, but the culture and attitude both from employees, the owners, and the service quality is very, very obvious. I remember the one guy (yes, i know it was person, not official from the company), made an anonymous donation of choir robes to the church (some of us found out who it was, anyway), and, as far as i know, that probably wasn't tax-deductible, 'cause that wouldn't've survived an audit by the IRS. Same guy also said we could use his parking for overflow, especially in snowy conditions. And that's just what we knew from the church (protestant, not catholic), so who knows what else he was doing. Without the fiduciary responsibility, i've seen companies themselves do actions, too, and take risks. The fiduciary duty, in particular, gives legal obligation to seek profit, which, most companies tend to do regardless, but, without it, offers the freedom that occasionally gets expressed for selfless acts.

EDIT: It's also the fiduciary responsibility that allows corporations to crush competition: you have to justify to stockholders why you're not getting absorbed into a larger company with more profits, and you can be held legally liable for it. If you're not a corporation, this is not a problem, which is why "mom and pop stores" still exist.
Post edited December 18, 2020 by kohlrak
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Mori_Yuki: ...
Thanks for the long response.

A few thoughts:

Even making a harmless joke about "the great leader" is a no-go taboo in a country with a leadership cult. Making a harmless joke about Hitler and Stalin was risking your life if somebody blabbered about it (people made jokes anyway, of course, only in secret). Those leadership cults have all the traits of a religion, and a fanatic one at that. And Maoism isn't far off from Stalinism.

CD Projekt is a publicly traded company, GOG is part of it. They have to answer their investors, and those want ROI... for a company customers are a necessary evil they need to please in the easiest and cheapest way possible, so they keep spending money. Everything "good" a company does is either something they want to do anyway (for instance go green, because the old tech is now heavily taxed) or a marketing measure (like DRM-free on GOG, which I think isn't in any form connected to any form of idealism any more, it's now simply the USP they work with).
And customers, for the most part, don't care about morals that much neither, or the sweat shops and slave work in Asia and elsewhere producing goods for the western world wouldn't be possible.
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Mori_Yuki: ...
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toxicTom: Thanks for the long response.

A few thoughts:

Even making a harmless joke about "the great leader" is a no-go taboo in a country with a leadership cult. Making a harmless joke about Hitler and Stalin was risking your life if somebody blabbered about it (people made jokes anyway, of course, only in secret). Those leadership cults have all the traits of a religion, and a fanatic one at that. And Maoism isn't far off from Stalinism.

CD Projekt is a publicly traded company, GOG is part of it. They have to answer their investors, and those want ROI... for a company customers are a necessary evil they need to please in the easiest and cheapest way possible, so they keep spending money. Everything "good" a company does is either something they want to do anyway (for instance go green, because the old tech is now heavily taxed) or a marketing measure (like DRM-free on GOG, which I think isn't in any form connected to any form of idealism any more, it's now simply the USP they work with).
And customers, for the most part, don't care about morals that much neither, or the sweat shops and slave work in Asia and elsewhere producing goods for the western world wouldn't be possible.
I took a chance on Cyberpunk and I rarely ever buy AAA games anymore because I love playing mods and no AAA allows mods, so I mostly gave up on newer games except for games like Serious Sam. I took a chance, but never again. I'm done with game companies that are publicly traded unless a friend buys me a game, I MIGHT play it, but I'm tired of the gaming industry. Even with the China thing aside, look how investors ruined the game industry as a whole. Fallout 76 is garbage, they promised mods and what a surprise no mods and they want you to pay for your own private server. Games aren't games anymore, they're bs services that rip you off. Cloud gaming is ever more absurd. Yeah let me pay for a game and not be able to paly it again after a few years. Fuck mainstream gaming, I'm done. I'll go and play Doom mods until I'm dead.
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CityDPRED: nobody benefits from racism.
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lace_gardenia: what do you think "systemic" means
Hmm, systematic you say?
Oh, I realise you used a different word, but anyway the point still stands. Race wasn’t an issue until a certain side chose to jump upon it, odd timing, no?
Post edited December 18, 2020 by user deleted
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kohlrak: ... "mom and pop stores" still exist.
Not here, 90% died. Because as soon as the next supermarket opened nearby, offering more stuff for less money, they simply couldn't compete. You have to know that, especially in the cities, most shopkeepers don't own the real estate they set up shop in - they have to pay rent. Dwindling turnover is often a quick death sentence. That's why German cities look all the same - the horrendous rents are only affordable for a handful of huge franchises, and in turn those are everywhere, pushing all smaller competition away.

Add to that the ridiciously German laws and regulations. Only big companies with a horde of lawyers and specialists can safely navigate this jungle of rules.
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shattenyagger: And I give even less of a shit about the little feelings of snowflake anti-semitic social-justice-warriors like BLM, Antifa and other Nazi organizations.
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lace_gardenia: yeah, way to take a stand for justice, you brave man you

edit: i myself am a white person, so i can both notice and point out that i have systemically benefited from that, thankyouverymuch
My wife is white. My kids therefore are half white. They see zero benefit or privilege from their "race". lol
Your decisions are not really motivated by your perceived "race". Make shitty decisions, you'll have a shitty life.
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lace_gardenia: yeah, way to take a stand for justice, you brave man you

edit: i myself am a white person, so i can both notice and point out that i have systemically benefited from that, thankyouverymuch
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shattenyagger: My wife is white. My kids therefore are half white. They see zero benefit or privilege from their "race". lol
Your decisions are not really motivated by your perceived "race". Make shitty decisions, you'll have a shitty life.
You are aware you're trying to reason with a person that comes from an SJW version of China?
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Post edited February 12, 2023 by lace_gardenia
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CityDPRED: Lol, “fragility”, want to see some real “fragility”?
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lace_gardenia: yeah, white people tend to be really angry when you point out systemic racism that benefits them

edit: see what i mean?
Stop being racist, it's disgusting.