And in the real world they have a legal responsibility to those investors. Being DRM free doesn’t have to work at cross purposes with what investors want. DRM is bad for business for many reasons.

Because I believe that in some countries, a company that has investors/shareholders has to perform as well as it can(i.e. put investors and profits first and/or foremost ahead of customers and etc) by law.

When a company is private, they don't have(afaik) such obligations by law.

=-=-=

Well said.....also interesting info, so thanks for that.

Also the explanation falls flat when one recalls that when the covid game dropped in the store, actual large numbers(of so it seemed) complained and asked for it to be delisted.

Gog didn't listen to the "will of many gamers" then.....yet supposedly it did now? I don't buy it.

How about informing yourself instead of insulting the (passive and public) investors? Far as I understand the biggest (and thus most powerful) investors sit in the management (or controlling parts) of the company. They have deceived (the other) investors and are now being sued (or in danger of it) due to it:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/12/cd-projekt-red-investors-sue-company-over-cyberpunk-2077-debacle/
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cdpr_faces_4_lawsuits_from_investors/page1
(and there may be other threads on the forum about it)
See recent promises "We truly hope that our efforts will let us rebuild the trust we have lost." to investors here: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/call-transcript_en.pdf
more: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/presentationtype/conference-calls/

Nothing of (the bad) what is currently going on is consistent with (public) 'investors' wishes. Its also against the outspoken promises of the management. (And they dont have a good track record on keeping promises so not surprising. Just look up broken GOG promises - although these were AFAIK "only" promises made for gamers.)

The US has applied economic sanctions against various entities (usually countries) for quite some time and few people in the West have been screaming. Screaming now because China is doing it is quite the double standard.

If a governing body decides they don't want to do business with a given entity, because said entity offends them, it is their prerogative. Now, you could argue quite convincingly that the Chinese state is quite easily offended, but that is up to the Chinese people to sort out. If they go too far, they'll just isolate themselves from the rest of the world (they are the biggest economy, but they are still a fraction of the world's economy).

Otherwise, concerning the specific point at hand (not Tibet or Taiwan, but the game Devotion), while being an *rsehole should not be illegal (and as far as I know, the creators of Devotion are not sitting in jail right now), that doesn't mean that there should be no ramification (lost economic opportunities, loss of reputation, etc).

Of course, its unfair that the social/economic consequence of being uncivil are applied proportionately to the leverage of the offended party (taking a cheap shot at the head of China seems to carry a lot more consequences than taking a cheap shot at the mayor of a small village), but it is still inadvisable to needlessly offend people (sometimes, giving offense is just a side-consequence of some other purpose, but other times, it is just needlessly gratuitous and in this case, it was needlessly gratuitous).

The Chinese Communist Party is one of the greatest mass murderers in human history.

Xi Jinping presides over concentration camps for Uyghurs. He persecutes Christians and other religious minorities. His government murders dissidents and sells their organs.

They deserve all the scorn the world can offer them.

It is truly bizarre to see a westerner defending the "right" of one of these moral monsters to not be offended.

Well, there's a difference, here: we're talking between states that are not the best of friends, not states vs companies. Still, we have to discuss the method of which these sanctions occur: did the US prevent China and Russia, at any point, from trading, or are we talking about the US preventing a conflict of interest among, specifically, NATO nations? Seeing as just about every country throughout history has been doing the tariff war thing, I've just assumed it was a matter of that and military allies agreeing to focus on military interests and how the economy affects that at a national level, rather than laser focused on a particular business. I'll be honest, sure, I've could've done more research, but those offended could've went out of their way to inform me. What china's doing, the people of china are supposedly part of the enforcement, so they don't even have ignorance for an excuse.

I will admit, however, that there has been a targeted attack on TikTok, lately. However, TikTok actually got caught spying on clipboards and other data. Now, if you turned around and said "but facebook and google!" we would be in an agreement on something, then, right? I do believe these companies' data collection tactics pose a realistic threat from a militaristic point of view via tracking logistics, obtaining confidential information on officials, etc. I do believe it would be reasonable for governments to request audits on the data that is stored and evaluate whether that breaches reasonable national security interests. And, it's not like there is no precident for this: Google got caught violating COPPA, hence th COPPA controversy on youtube, where they started to try to pin it on youtubers instead of accepting responsibility for their own data collection. There's 2 problems to this:

1) We're not talking about China saying it doesn't want to do business with the devs of devotion. We have China saying it doesn't want anyone else doing business with Devotions devs, either.

2) I think we're at the point where we put your theory to the test. China seems to have all the major businesses by the nose-ring, and we're not seeing any changes. Hell, not even getting kicked out of china seems to be enough: the companies will just do whatever they can to convince china to grab them by the nosering again (hello, Google). Yes, but this is a bit of overstepping going on, here. If i offend the LGBTQIA+ community, it seems reasonable that they might boycott me, as well as friends and family of people in that community. However, an anti-LGBTQIA+ activist should be able to feel right at home, no matter how much of assholes everyone in the trasaction are. How else can we hold power structures accountable for going too far than voting with our wallets and ideas? Say the LGBTQIA+ community adds "P" (pedophile) to the acronym. With the natural pandering companies do (for better or worse, depending on your perspective), if we (including people from the LGBTQIA+ community who might be offended by the decision, which I imagine would be most of the community) can't vote with our wallets, how can capitalism even reflect the average consumer? Just look at the friction that lead to the LGB Alliance splintering from the LGBTQIA+ community. But, this example might be too close to home for some users, so why don't we abstract it to, say, China? Or how about Islam? What about Trump and supporters? What about a vile Christian game? Does it really matter?

You see, in the west, we used to have this separation from "words and ideas" and "physically applied actions." To this degree, "loli hentai" would be legal, but pornography of children would be illegal. It is by this same principle that movies with violence in it is legal, because no one's actually getting killed for the purpose of the movie, but snuff films are very illegal (there seems to be an exception for "incidental recordings" due to their passive nature, which is actually consistent when you think about it). Somewhere along the line, we completely lost this notion, and now speech itself can be a form of violence, especially as we stripped humanity of it's ability to have agency over it's own decisions. Howe can we ever expect humanity to improve if we continue to coddle it to the degree that is has no freedom to act and learn from it's mistakes? And who gets to be the arbiter of what is gratuitous and what is not? I don't think we have the level of omniscience to separate bad intentions from bad delivery, no matter how obvious it may seem at the time. But, consider what was going on here: are we sure it asn't a placeholder? Normally, i'd say no (because it looks to be baked into the wall's texture), but it seems they didn't take long to remove it, suggesting to me that my reason for such an assumption was wrong (it really wasn't baked into the wall). Who knows what all other other junk was used as place holders? Things like this get found all the time. Heck, Halo 1 has a hidden message that was never meant to be found where some dude announced his love for his wife/girlfriend. This kind of thing happens all the time, and lots of times things don't get found, but sometimes accidentally they get found. Just yesterday I decrypted a message in Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online that the translators never translated, which suggests to me that it wasn't meant to be decrypted (and, honestly, i'd be surprised if anyone else has managed to decrypt it, even in Japan).

From you attitude towards this topic in this and other threads, I assumed you were just trying to treadmill and derail the discussion. I misjudged you and apologize.

By "Germany is free to...", I don't mean "Germany still actively censors certain symbology in games". I mean Germany did it in the past and is free to re-implement it, much like Australia censored and still censors certain games in Australia, and certain Christian majority nations censored or outright banned certain movies, and are well within their rights to do it in their own countries.

The issue at hand is one country effectively prohibiting other countries from purchasing a game made by a third party. Like Germany flexing its muscle to forbid EU countries from buying a game by a Luxembourg studio that has an Easter egg in which a photo of a bloodhound has the name "Angela" underneath it, for example

Hope that cleared it up.

- The US never applied economic sanctions because of mockery directed at their presidents, and we all know there's been plenty of that throughout the years. Let alone a deleted Easter egg in a game.
- There's been plenty of 'screaming' about that.
- The sanctions were never about "the rest of the world can't trade with country X", but "The US won't trade with country X" (though, granted, they certainly made appeals to morality to have others follow in their footsteps). That's a given. Which is why it's not even the point and never has been (see above). Exactly. And the expected consequences are "you won't be selling this game in China, buster". Again, the problem is when you have other companies kowtowing to a thin-skinned, prickly regime and help turn that into a de facto worldwide ban.

Some of the greatest murderers in human history were in our own backyard. I'm talking of course about the near-extinction of the native South American and North American cultures (actually, technically, some did go extinct).

Then, in the US, you had the slavery, an internal war over it (guess some people really wanted it bad), Jim Crow... a needless war in Iraq (a country which wouldn't have been so messed up btw if the West had not drawn the country lines ways that are so messed up as to ensure the entire region is unstable for generations to come post-WWII)... a war which was in the name of fighting the greatest terrorist to have breached your soil, who was actually trained by you.

Of course, you also had the toppling of a bunch of democracies, namely in South America (all in the name of fighting the commies of course), your horrendous treatment of Cuba... and lets not forget how you treat many of your own citizens (who in one of the most prosperous countries in the world have a hard time affording basic healthcare or higher education).

And China... victim of the opoid-war and several unfair treaties imposed by the West. One could say that they became so radicalised so quickly due to military pressures from the West (for them, it was a struggle for survival after all).

None of this is uniquely characteristic of Western Countries (lets not flagellate ourselves too much about that), we were simply given the bigger baton and we did as people do when they have the bigger baton. We used it of course.

So no, the Chinese are not evil. The Chinese are quite human I assure you.

We are a very social species, but we're also a very tribal one. Our empathy has an unfortunately tendency to end at the peripheries of whichever group we call ours.

When it comes to the devotion decision and what affected it, most people are talking more about the CCP....and not the chinese people.

And whether evil truly exists or not: some of the stuff they've done(including things like encouraging censorship outside their borders, in games and other media, such as what likely led to the devotion delisting) goes from being somewhat wrong to pretty evil to a good number of people.

That said, do you suggest that we should ignore such things(like the devotion issue) and do nothing about them because it's "human nature"?

Lastly, bringing up evils of other countries(most of them in the past) doesn't change the fact that the CCP has done or made possible some nasty things(the devotion thing being but a small fragment of it).

(It's also a good example of whataboutism)

Its even worse when you apply it to an entire country. A lot more people are adversely affected, may of whom have nothing to do with the grievance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_Cuba

The US lost all rights to critize any country for applying economic sanctions after this one.

Whats even worse is that Cuba previously had a more diverse agriculture. They specialised into sugar (and became heavily dependant on trade) because they had a foreign-backed dictatorship that pandered to foreign interests as opposed to what was good for Cuba.

Of course, that made it doubly painful when the sanction was put in effect. Quite disgusting really.

You can say what you want about Castro's dictatorship, at least, he was in it for his own country which is a definite step up from his US-backed predecessor.

And compared to that, putting up sanctions against a game (in terms of overall impact on people's lives) seems quite small doesn't it?

I wouldn't go deep into political discussion of a matter that seems more simple.
GOG isn't selling Devotion for unknown reasons but says it is doing this for the gamers. The gamers that want to play it are excluded by this reasoning and are treated as second rate customers.
Don't like the game, the message or the devs, don't buy it. Don't sell it in chinese region if it is a problem there. But let people vote with their wallets without hiding behind doing it for them, it's not the case. The decision is GOG and GOG alone and that should be addressed because it's anticonsumer at best.

Countries did and will do bad things......including those some people here live in(the ones criticizing GOG I mean)....but so what? Are you saying or inferring that only "pure"(morally/etc) people can criticize such?

Also yes the issue is "small" in the grand scheme of things, but does that mean it's not worth being criticized or that it should go un criticized?

-

addition: I believe one saying goes "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone"

Problem is, who in the world is fully "without sin"?

Even in a country where there are no elections, the people are still responsible for their government. If their government is posing a legitimate threat to another government, it's fair. The objective of economic sanctions between countries is to pose a "more peaceful" form of deterrance than war. The first paragraph there shows what happened: Cuba allowed US entrepreneurs come in, establish businesses, then simply took the businesses from them without compensation. The natural thing to do, then, would be to disallow business between the two coutnries, because Cuba was clearly exploiting americans. Maybe you shouldn't, as a country, simply take hard-earned work from citizens of a foreign country without compensation. How much money might have been invested by the US government, for example, or the citenzenry of the country via the stock market? We can talk about how horrible the results were, but if you come up to me face-to-face and slap me, i'm probably going to knock you out. We could say, "yes, Cuba has the right as it's own country," but that would be akin to inviting someone into your house then invoking castle doctrine. Cuba lost the highground before the sanctions even happened. But notice the sanctions are quite different, here: the game has done no tangible damage to China, unlike Cuba. And we're not just talking about a minor resource: we're talking about oil during the discussions of "the energy crisis." A modern equivalent would be if all chinese owned domain-names (that end with US owned suffices, like .com, .us, .edu, .org, etc) in the US were confiscated and suddenly pointed to US owned websites.

EDIT: The us has done this before on many occasionas, actually. There was a server in China that was pretty popular called MegaUpload, and overnight it vanished "because of piracy." In fact, my own website was taken down when Microsoft targeted my domain provider Ex Parte. Although Microsoft won that court case, it violated it's ex parte agreement to keep my website and other websites not involved in it's case running. And, yes, i'm sure you'll remember that in both cases americans who were aware of it were fairly upset.

You can try to frame the issue to circumvent the fact that the US controlled another country by proxy via a dictator and then cried wolf when said country revolved and chose not to honor commitments that were made while it was a puppet state.

However, I will bring your attention to this fact in particular:

"Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution every year condemning the ongoing impact of the embargo and declaring it in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law. In 2014, out of the 193-nation assembly, 188 countries voted for the nonbinding resolution, the United States and Israel voted against and the Pacific Island nations Palau, Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstained.[2][14] Human-rights groups including Amnesty International,[2] Human Rights Watch,[15] and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights[16] have also been critical of the embargo. "

Literally, out of 193 countries at an assembly, 188 agreed (and I'm sure you know how hard it is to reach a consensus internationally on such matters) that the US was in the wrong here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to bash on the US specifically here (you guys are human too). Its just that before going too far in trying to take the moral high ground, it a good idea to look at your own misdeeds.

I'm not saying that some of the things happening in China are not worrysome (they are). However, in the grand scheme of things, this particular issue is small potatoes. I would also strongly resist framing China as the worst country in the world (we all have skeletons in our closet).