Thanks!

If you think about it, the only thing the 50 cent army is doing is making sure that companies don't take corrective action on content they find questionable.

If they do, it won't help anyway, and if they don't, they can at least get support from the people who want the content in the game in the first place.

Pretty nonsensical of China, but at the Chinese level, it's likely more an bureaucratic outcome of being on a list that no one questions more so than anything.

who knows? one way of looking at it is that if gOg did go through with it, they could be blocked in China. And there are actaully a lot of gamers (i.e. people who play games....) in China (as it is a big marked). Now, put yourself in their shoes - would you like the possibility of getting gOg blocked? over one game? you will lose all the gOg catalogue, just beacuse they decided to sell a game (maybe even a game you are not interested in) - what would you do?

I would tell the truth:

"It has come to our attention that there is some ongoing controversy regarding the game Devotion and the Chinese market. We are analyzing the situation and we have decided to not release the game right now because of this and we have no new release date in sight."

I doubt China would block GOG for a statement like that, but I'd be willing to risk it.

People talk about the 1 billion people in China (and many, many of those don't even have a computer and live under the 2 dollars a day mark) forgetting that there are some other billions outside China that may take a stance regarding this kind of stuff.

Yes I would! One does not bow down to tyrannical & immoral orders, just because the tyrannical regime has a lot of power to punish the innocent victim who does not comply with them.

The argument from many GOG customers that GOG should bow down and comply is quite appalling!

That is why there are phrases like "give me liberty or give me death!" Because living life as a slave is oftentimes a fate worse than death.

But advocates of the position that is being pushed in that quoted post: you all are basically saying that GOG must submit to becoming a slave, because if they don't, then the slavemaster is going to hurt them real bad.

Threat of punishment is never a good reason to bow down to a tyrant. On the contrary, it's all the more reason never to submit, no matter what, not even on the pain of death.

Never submitting, and always standing on one's principles, is what someone - whether it be a person or company - with integrity and morals and self-respect would do.

This.

But it is even worse when not only you submit, you blame it on a generic term that includes the people that support you and would never do as such: "many gamers".

But your point is that if a bully threatens to hurt someone if the victim of the threat doesn't give into the bully's demands, and if the bully has the power to back up their threat, then the victim must give into the bully's demands, and do whatever they say.

Is that not so? How is what I just incompatible with and/or contradictory to the position that you are pushing?

I don't know enough of chinese society's principles to answer that, nor do i think anyone else does. However, if this were the united states, where i grew up as i actualyl did grow up ,i would be saddened, but I would not take a stance against GOG when the blame rests with my government and my people (for not doing something about the government). I would be on the forums, telling GOG to call my country's bluff, saying that these affairs are not GOG's business, but between the developer and my country.

The Chinese people are effectively censored from knowing what's going on in the world.
Western games and movies are only allowed there if they conform to what the censors allow, Star Wars a movie about bringing down an evil empire is a big nono
Tencent, a PRC controlled company already regulates PRC gaming needs, in the end they won't allow foreign influence (see Mark Suckerberg, Apple etc.).
1.4 billion Chinese isn't worth the 8 billion of the rest of the world, so there is the shareholder argument.

Simply put, you don't deal with the devil, even if he looks like Winnie the Pooh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swuir_7YIPs

I agree 100% with your posts, but also, we as Americans are raised from a young age to know our rights and protect our freedom. Chinese people generally have a completely different mindset. I had a good friend from China that moved to the USA. Her parents bought a Chinese restaurant. When she found out I was a techie, she wanted to know the process for getting a license to have a website.

She didn't realize that in America, you don't need a license to have a website. She hadn't been taught about the free speech or the rest of the bill of rights. She hadn't been raised learning about the revolution and how America fought for its freedom. Her parents weren't hippies that went to protests.

Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment of your post. I also consistently stand up to bullies even when it's a objectively bad idea, and do everything I can to defend my rights. But you also need to understand that in addition to America having a mostly functional democracy and enumerated civil rights, we are raised to have a mindset that corresponds to that, and people living in China aren't.

According to https://www.comdirect.de/inf/aktien/bayer-aktie-DE000BAY0017
BlackRock, Inc. has only 7,17% of Bayer.

There is a legal obligation to make money. The reality however is that the system is "corrupt" and most management works more for their own benefit than for shareholders benefit. The system feeds on the egoism of individual shareholders: Its too hard (and inefficient from an egoistical POV) to change the system. Similar to why people vote for politicians that later then screw them over.
If you would actually know anything about "shareholders" you would know that a lot of normal people are shareholders. But due to the above they have very little pratical influence and the bundled power of financial institutions effectively makes the decisions. And in cases like CDPR SA its particularly bad because there is major overlap between management and shareholders.

And how do you bring that change? I mean, if they want to have influence over how we deal with poland, i think it's only fair that their culture is a stake in the game, too.

Far as I know this is not the (full?) truth though. I have seen evicence on GOG reddit (and I think in forum here too) that GOG made a placating Weibo post promising to "not hurt feelings" or sth like that. Unfortunately I dont have a link. It was also claimed that soon after Chinese made the whole thing vanish from Weibo or sth like that. It can probably be still found somewhere on https://old.reddit.com/r/gog/

Ultimately, the people of China need to change their country. Nobody can oppress over a billion people if they don't let it happen. But what we need to do in this situation and similar situations is keep the censorship and totalitarian mindset of China from affecting us in the rest of the world.

GOG needs to understand if they choose to earn money in China, they need to do it without affecting the rest of us, or many of us may choose to no longer participate.

Over these last few days, I've gone from a fan of GOG and CD Project, to disgusted. I really want to spend $7 on the things I don't have in the Lucasarts pack, and haven't because I feel dirty spending money here. GOG needs to realize that the only market advantage they have over other services is their consistent stand on DRM and world markets, and if they lost that, there's no reason for many of us to come here anymore.