I'm gonna be extremely truthful here. Chinese produce my electronics with slave labor? Fine by my me. Hong Kong getting annexed? Sucks for them. Games and other fiction being censored or banned in China? I really, really don't like it, but what the fuck am I going to do? Just make the game unavailable to Chinese market.

In other words, I don't care about fighting this "good fight".

But Chinese government dictating what everyone else, all around the world is allowed to buy and play? Move to China and go get your organs harvested, because once you give them a finger they'll eventually take your entire arm. Maybe this time it's a game you had no interest playing, but what about the eventual next time when the company decides to kneel again to make some other game unavailable? Or demand the developer to remove in-game content according to Chinese government policies? Just go google a list of all the frivolous reasons that numerous games have been banned there.

Are we expected to allow a dictator in a shithole country dictate what gamers in USA, Finland, Japan and all the countries GOG operates in are allowed to purchase and play? Because this is exactly what's happening here, this is the decision GOG knowingly made: they're telling us that Chinese sensibilities are more important than their own customers. If a company has no interest in serving their own customers, then it's not a company I'm willing to support. They clearly have more important things they want to do.

It's also nice how OP tries to deflect this into GOG vs. Steam issue, as if the people criticizing GOG over this wouldn't do this for Steam as well. Really cute.

Ah the good old "Saint Florian principle":

"Saint Florian, please spare my house, light the other's houses instead!"

This +100. It's sad to see how many apologists seem to be present on this site. First, they are making excuses for DRM in No man's Sky and Cyberpunk, now they make apologies for why the site has to bend over and accept political blackmail from China.

"There's nothing we can do about it anyway, so why should we bother trying?"

"As long as I get mah games as cheap as possible ... why should I give a shit?"

Pathetic

Even Kotaku's normal readers are blasting gog for this, and that's sayin' something.

Yes, you're very brave refusing to take a moral stand in defense of a wronged party out of fear of retaliation. And convincing yourself your open cowardice and lack of foresight is somehow a virtue. Or worse, the misguided belief that conceding to tyranny will somehow protect you later down the line.

Don't you get it? Devotion is simply the first of *many* games that will end up removed from the platform if we allow this to stand. There are hundreds, literal *thousands* of games out there that the communist regime unlawfullty occuppying the Chinese mainland has targeted with similar attacks in the past. There are literal hundreds of TV shows. Hundreds of movies. In fact, that same terrorist regime has previously banned gog.com itself from being *accessible* in the country to all but a tiny handful of people.

It.

Will.

Not.

End.

Here.

We've seen just that any time any of you short sighted idiots bows to the troll army's baseless demands. There are always new ones. They don't give a flying fuck about if a game sells or not, and to be rather blunt, none of the Womao are allowed to game to begin with. All they care about is punishing anyone who dares to question a rotting corpse of totalitarian regime's increasingly bizarre demands as it eats itself alive from the inside out.

Furthermore, I'm just gonna be blunt here: I live in a free nation. I am not beholden to every tinpot dictaorship's desperate and increasingly bizzare efforts to retain control over it's own people's thoughts feelings, and just overall control.

Why the fuck are these useless piles of shit trying to prop up the rotting corpse of one of the world's last remaining totalitarian states allowed to make demands of *ME*?

my turn happened before this :P

Well said. It will not end here.

Yes. This is one of those times when, if you give an inch, they will take a mile. It will be that way with DRM and it will be that way with totalitarian political censorship as well.

Freedom is not given, it's earned, even if it means bloodshed, and if you want to "not get involved with the mob mentality" while having the audacity to start fights with people who are standing up for themselves and making idiotic accusations Mr. Yeshu, don't act surprised when everyone else starts calling you a spineless pussy.

It will never end at the rate its going so I find it pointless.

Exactly...I still remember all these people doing the same here for some twitter posts 1-2 years ago when linko lost his job because of them (they even doxxed him) that is how pathetic these people are....hopefully in 2-3 weeks we will be done with them and move on.

No, I do care. I bought Detention, the first Red Candle Game, from Steam back in 2017 and absolutely loved it. It had one of the best stories I've ever experienced in a video game and, even though it was a short game that I finished in one evening, I kept thinking about the game and its story for a full week after.

When I learned the Red Candle Games had released their next game I was excited to buy it. Only to find out it had been pulled from Steam by the publisher six days after release because of one stupid joke. The devs were forced to publicly apologise and even after apologising and removing said joke, they and their game have been treated like lepers in the gaming industry. Because Chinese government and their trolls are overtly sensitive snowflakes who can't get over a joke that happened almost 2 years ago and being apologised for it over and over again. But no, once you invoke the wrath of China, you are branded for life and don't get a second chance. It was and is heartbreaking to see a group of passionate and talented game developers being treated in this way.They deserve better and the people wanting to play their games deserve a chance to do so.

That's why I was overjoyed to see they were finally doing re-release for Devotion on GOG and why GOG backing out of their word and pulling the game just hours later after Chinese backlash that they should have seen coming felt like a punch in the gut. It was happening AGAIN because seemingly no one has the backbone to tell the Chinese market "fine, you might not want this game, but others do, no one is forcing you to buy it". It was a betrayal I won't forget and even if it makes no difference, I'm not going to support a company that allows this kind of toxic censorship.

You might not have known about Devotion before or give a damn about the game, but I did and I do give a damn.

I can't speak for anyone else, but which game has been pulled from GOG because of pressure from a foreign government?

So are you gonna do anything about it or continue your crusade as a brave keyboard warrior?