What many people think: China started all this. GOG had to respond somehow and couldn't do anything else because China threatened them.

What actually happened: GOG started all this by announcing Devotion's release on their Weibo (China's Twitter), and China is just being China.

Think about it. The game caused a controversy in China before (objectionable material was since removed). There was a campaign against it on the Chinese social media. If you were in GOG's shoes and decided to re-release the game a year later, which one place do you want to avoid posting about it?

Your answer: Ch............. s............. m...........

Clearly, that wasn't GOG's answer. Why? Who knows. But the point is:

They let the Chinese social media know first-hand from their official Weibo account that the game these people successfully managed to get taken down from Steam a year ago is now coming back. So, the same people started the same campaign again. Surprising? Not.

They tweeted straight into the lion's den. What did they expect? Everything else that followed is purely on them.

GOG cannot claim they only did what they did to survive if they had started it all themselves.

What if: Instead GOG could have released the game elsewhere except in China, not posted about it in China, and there would have been no controversy in China.

There were games censored in some countries released on GOG before, and GOG were able to sell them elsewhere. There are also other games on GOG that used to be controversial in China but nobody on the Chinese social media is complaining about it because GOG didn't remind them by tweeting about it from their official Weibo account.

What now: They should not have promoted the game in China, and they should not have banned it outside of China. Both are politically-charged decisions, and businesses should avoid political activism. But the first misstep cannot be cancelled by the other, the mistakes only keep compounding.

It's one thing to buy from China. It's another thing to let China determine who you can buy from.

The former is fine. The latter puts anyone who agrees to it in a subordinate position.

Chinese customers are important. Their sensitivities should be respected. But the other customers must not be an afterthought either.

China themselves understands this and just like they wouldn't let anyone else decide what's going on within their country, they accept they won't have the final say in what's going on outside their borders. Disney's very own Winnie-the-Pooh hasn't been banned worldwide, despite the company's huge presence in China.

The right thing to do now is still to release the game outside of China. This is the only decision that can convince people from over 190 other countries that they are not second-class customers to GOG.

Credit: the announcement was actually spotted early on by Mori_Yuki but it seems very few people are aware of it until now. GOG's Weibo post was deleted since but I was able to verify it with other sources and obtain a screenshot, on which you can also see some people celebrating. The second screenshot is GOG's retraction statement. Both are attached. The last part of my message was inspired by a post by Shendue.

Thanks for posting those screenshots, Turbo-Beaver.

What does the text in them say, though?

I agree with most of your post. I'm iffy on this part though, in which you seem to be suggesting it's fine to ban the game in China due to alleged complaints about it from supposed Chinese gamers: How do we know that there were actual "Chinese customers" who allegedly complained, as opposed to say, government agents, or bots controlled by government agents, or just general trolls who don't care about GOG and only came to the controversy when they heard about it from others, but who have zero interest in GOG?

And furthermore, how do we know that there are more Chinese gamers who want the game banned, than those who do not? Shouldn't GOG at least conduct a scientific poll or something like that, in order to make a sound determination as to whether or not it is truly the case that more want it to be banned?

And what about people from China who are living abroad and who are GOG customers, they are still Chinese, so do they get a say? If not, why do the alleged 'gamers' who live in China have more say than the Chinese people who now live in a different country?

And a lot of people, including myself, object to GOG carrying terrorism-simulator & glorification games, like "Tonight We Riot," yet GOG ignores us and keeps right on selling that evil game on their platform, and GOG gives zero consideration to our sensitivities.

So with all that being so, why should alleged gamers in China have the special privilege to dictate what games GOG isn't allowed to sell, but yet, customers in other nations have no such privilege, and zero say as to what GOG does or doesn't sell?

Having said all that, I do agree with the general idea of your overall post, and most certainly GOG needs to, at the very least, unban the game in every other nation besides China, if they are going to ban it at all.

I'll try to post a translation later (or if anyone else wants to in the meantime, please feel free to do so). What I'm trying to do is to summarize the strongest arguments why the game should at least be released elsewhere. Whether it should be released in China is, I believe, a separate matter (which we can also discuss, of course).

As far as I know, there isn't anything in the game that would warrant it being banned in China either. But I also think it's not for us to decide this. Just like we don't want it being decided for us whether it's banned elsewhere. What I wrote I meant as a general observation. In response to what happened, some people have become very vocal against China, and everything Chinese. I don't agree with it personally, and I also think GOG should respect all their customers as a general rule. One reason I'm about to abandon ship is that I don't feel respected the way GOG handled this. Neither do the Chinese customers writing in their forum, and getting no response whatsoever. Something's wrong about all of it.

Back to Devotion: we don't really know who complained. I wrote about what I think might happened in an earlier post (which I think you've seen), and also here but it's just conjecture. I think it might have been people broadly interested in gaming but not necessarily GOG's prospective customers.

As an aside, before Devotion was delisted from Steam (by the Chinese publisher), the objectionable stuff was removed from the game in a patch but the people complaining about it were apparently using pirated copies, so they never got the patch that removed the stuff they were complaining about. This is supposedly one reason why the controversy about it never subsided. Devotion seems to have a lot of positive feedback from Chinese players on Steam forums. There are not many games portraying Chinese culture in an authentic way (since the authors are familiar with it). In other circumstances it's not difficult to imagine a game like this actually being promoted by China as it showcases their culture.

People who don't like something always have the option not to buy it and move on, so I generally find it very suspicious that someone would spend their time trying to get something like this delisted, as the original issue with it was resolved. I expect only a small minority would want it banned compared to the number of people who would want to play it. But again, this is just conjecture. I'm not aware of this but if that's case then that's a very good question to ask.

You from Christmas Island, and its Christmas!
Hope Santa gives you the gift of brains, you are severely lacking in that department.

Haha, oh man. Their PR department really is run by complete incompetents. Not entirely sure but I think Fan7a-sy tells one person something like "regardless, CDPR still insulted" and I think he encourages to convince GOG to prohibit the game.

Kwiat laughs at GOG for how quickly they backpedaled.

I find the weibo usage of @ and // completely confusing though. lol (yes I'm not big on social media, I find twitter confusing too).

GOG actually started this when they insulted our intelligence by telling us we wanted this, and by continuing to remain silent on this. So has my wallet so far, and my games have almost finished backing up today. They literally could have said something far more generic, like "Due to issues surrounding the game and internal discussions on whether our store could offer proper hosting under such circumstances, we've determined that we won't be able to offer hosting for Devotion at this time and offer our apologies to the developers." I. a random forum user, can come up with a better message than they can.

You create yet another thread on this subject, you show how much time and energy you spent to dig useless information that doesnt prove anything and doesnt lead anywhere.
You try hard to pretend you are unbiased and objective, but statements like "China is just being China" in the context, prove the contrary.
Despite your research in the matter, you still offer theories and conjectures about what exactly happened and WHY it happened.
In the end your thread brings nothing new, ends on the same "its China who forced this decision" tone. Its just another "release Devotion on GOG" thread.

The reality is we dont know why the game was pulled, your whole theory is based on thin air and i can come up with my own theories based on thin air: what if all this is just a publicity stunt? They stirred sh*t on Steam, then they pulled the game themselves, now they did the same thing on GOG. Its very likely they sold more copies of their obscure game like this, than if they had proper releases.

Transcription and translation as promised

Screenshot 1 "GOG.COM guarantees not to do anything to hurt everybody's feelings, please rest assured." "Hahahahaha, feels like one can just sit and watch, GOG directly deleted that post." "Boycott [Cyberpunk] 2077"

Responding to Mela70nia: "Boycott!"

Responding to 惡·犬 ("Fierce Dog"): "Excellent, fast-forward to [the moment when] [all] games [from] the GOG platform are completely banned"

Responding to 杨勃碍, a person who perhaps expressed some doubts: "[But] CDPR [CD Projekt Red] did insult [China] after all" "GOG's done for"

Screenshot 2 "We received a lot of comments from you regarding the news earlier today about 'Devotion' becoming available on GOG. Hereby we would like to let all of you know that this game will not be published on the GOG platform."

This part is actually somewhat interesting. "Kwiat" is obviously not a very Chinese nickname. As a matter of fact, it happens to be a word in Polish, meaning 'flower.' So there's some account with a Polish-sounding nickname cheering on as calls intensify for the boycott of the "Polish Stupid Ass" (what CD Projekt is commonly referred to as in China). You couldn't make that up.

You were.

I can't really browse Weibo (seems to interfere with my browser settings) but from the screenshots we can see the 3 social-media accounts in China that are now in charge of curating the GOG platform: https://weibo.com/u/2007065461 FaN7a-SY, https://weibo.com/u/2041441477 Mela70nia, and https://weibo.com/u/7523766913 惡·犬 ("Fierce Dog"). At least the first two of these also seem to be mutual followers.

There was a nearly universal surprise with GOG's decision, how it was communicated, and the subsequent silence about it. The official GOG message board seems like the obvious place to discuss it, also giving the company a chance to respond and address the community. Numerous people presented their take on various aspects of the whole situation. Considering the number of posts, having the discussion separated into more than a single thread seems reasonable to me.

Practically all the other threads here now are either promotional in nature or completely off-topic, with most of the remaining ones being one-off questions or complaints about technical issues or the refunds process. I don't see any harm being done by having a couple of threads to discuss different aspects of what many see as GOG's most severe reputational crisis since its inception. However, you're certainly free to make your case to the forum moderators that this, as well as presumably all the other Devotion-related threads, be removed.

That being said, I've only ever created one thread (this one), and it was to share not just my opinion but also some of the information I was able to find out, which hadn't been posted up to that point. As a matter of fact, I also believe you yourself had created at least one thread related to the Devotion controversy as well, and that was just to state your opinion, without uncovering any new facts.

It would seem then that each of us created an equal number of threads on this subject, only I also did it with the goal to provide some new information.

I appreciate your concern for my well-being. You are certainly entitled to your judgment regarding the usability of the information in this thread. However you may recognize that your subjective opinion on this matter is not necessarily a universal one. On a general note, most people would likely agree that knowing more is uniformly a better position to find oneself in than knowing less. Thus, extra information, as long as it is truthful, could hardly be considered strictly useless.

Relating to this situation, there have been consistent calls for GOG to explain who the "many gamers" that demanded the game be delisted were. This thread is, in particular, an attempt to shed some light on this question in lieu of an official explanation never provided by GOG.

As a matter of fact, I've never claimed to be unbiased and objective. I am simply stating my own subjective opinion on the matter, just as anybody else on a discussion forum would. My bias is clear as a person with a long-term positive sentiment towards CD Projekt/GOG who would like to be able to remain their customer.

Being both unbiased and objective is a very hard benchmark to attain. Out of sheer curiosity, do you consider yourself less biased and more objective on this issue than I am?

That is the polar opposite of what I've been saying. It was GOG, I believe, that forced this issue on their Chinese social-media followers. It's all laid out in the initial post. What you put in quotation marks is not an actual quote from anything I would have written (even more so considering the grammar).

If you look at what I wrote here and in the other threads, you will have seen that I have consistently interpreted the events in a manner most accommodating to the Chinese side, whenever there is any room for interpretation. For example, a lot of the discussion has focused on whether there is any objectionable content in the game or not, i.e. whether the Chinese have a reason to complain at all. Yet in this very thread I specifically wrote that: That is, regardless of the actual content of the game. What's more, I also said how GOG's decision to promote the game in China was (perhaps inadvertently) politically-charged. If you are implicitly accusing me of anti-China bias then by all means go on but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody else who's gone to such lengths not to reach for the low-hanging fruit of jumping to easy conclusions on this matter.

Have you seen the attached screenshots? I've also posted a transcript and translation since. I think at this point what happened should be pretty evident, unless you choose to ignore the obvious facts, that is.

Kinda had a feeling you were being sarcastic but then again in the EU or EU countries in general there are subsidies tied to this diversity bullshit. Last time I recall one of our ministers called out the fact that if you don't have enough blacks or women in certain sectors your subsidies will be taken from you or will be withheld. Maybe CDPR doing the same with their first part of year announcement virtue signaling the gender and color of their staff. Not that it should matter in the first place. Anybody who says that only diversity of the mind should matter gets labeled racist.

And for a long time, it seems this place has been lacking in delivering any actual games cause variety is barely to be found. Every release feels nothing more than another copy-pasted game after another. Not to mention the retarded nature of how they handled the China affair shows they have little insight and just pander to any person that cries being offended.

Really now? Not very modest are we?
so i guess you now claim to be speaking in the name of the "many", who claim that this is somehow a reputation crisis of GOG...so many claims, so little reason.
However much i think you guys are disturbed idiots, i respect your right to be so, so i will fight GOG if they ever decide to remove your idiotic posts.
Correct, point taken.
Another point taken but....can you say with a straight face that the goal of your post was to provide new information?
Yeah, the only problem is that you fail to shed any light on this question. Just an opinion.
Yes and no, yes for the simple reason im less emotionally invested in this issue. Dont give a toss about the game, the Chinese gamers sensibilities, the GOG decision and all...and no because i am emotionally invested against the excessive drama generated by this subject and its inherent anti-China tone.
There are the facts and there are our interpretations of facts.
The facts are few in this case, and your interpretations are many, and not based on anything solid.
Personally im not ignoring the few facts, what i am rejecting is your interpretations of said facts.

Who said it's wrong to be off-topic here? I didn't. It's not. So I wasn't passing a judgment of any kind, if that's what you're implying. This is a forum for GOG users, not just about GOG. People discuss whatever they want. GOG also posts new topics to keep people updated about new releases and seasonal discounts: these are the promotional topics. The two categories combined make up a lot of this forum, and there's nothing wrong with it. Nobody ever said there was.

As a reminder, I wrote this in response to your claim that there were too many topics about the Devotion controversy. There can never be too many GOG-related topics on the official GOG forum. At end of the day that's what this forum is for.

In any case, there were more topics briefly, but it's down to only a couple active topics now, of which one was created as the release announcement by GOG themselves.

No, I don't. In fact I have specifically said that:
You implied I created many topics. Not true. I did not. I only created a single topic. However, many other people created many topics. You complained about many topics. I don't see any problem with many topics about an important issue related to GOG on the official GOG forum. The people who created these topics believe this is an important issue, a reputational problem for GOG. I happen to agree but this is not only my isolated opinion. I speak in my own name, and all the other people who posted about it, and created all the topics you complained about, speak in their own respective names. Does this all really have to be clarified?

If you yourself saw many topics about this appearing, all but a single one not created by me, you can't possibly be saying nobody else thought it was an important issue. It's either one or the other.

You claim I was speaking in the name of many: I wasn't. Yet now you seem to be talking to many?

Who else are you referring to? There's only me here.

I already said I also did it with the goal of providing new information (highlighted in the original quote).

For the record, the other goals included stating how I consider this information relevant, and presenting my point of view on the matter.

Just my biased and subjective opinion here but you don't strike me as a person who's not emotionally-invested in this issue at all.

Fair point. There could be more facts. How do we get them? Certainly not from GOG, as they've gone silent. Any ideas where and how to obtain more facts?

Separately, given the facts we know now, what is your interpretation of them, and how is it different than what I presented?

Chinese being racist to GOG because they're Polish?.....figures.
(that seems to be a big problem over there in general...somewhat shown in things like how foreign games and other media must be changed to be sold in some such countries)

So it's a small "clique" of users causing all the uproar which led(more or less) to the GOG decision? Just like with other kneejerk responses by gaming companies and other companies(after such uproar on other social media).

-

Sidenote: Ka-bo-ro is very likely a troll...and possibly trying to derail the thread, pick apart the topic(for whatever reason), and/or insult people. My advice is to not bother replying to them(at least in this topic).
(though of course, everyone can and should do as they please)

For the record, it's "ass" in the sense of 'donkey,' and it seems the game developer DICE (since acquired by EA) was being called "Swedish Stupid Ass" earlier, in relation to the number of bugs in their game Battlefield 4 back in 2013.

As for the account, it could be anybody behind it, so I'm not really sure what to make of it. They obviously must have some connection to Poland though, otherwise where would the nickname come from. I just thought it's mildly amusing because if the boycott really took on, it's not inconceivable that anybody with a username pointing to that country would be suspect. So I probably wouldn't be cheering on that particular boycott if I were that person.

There must have been more, I just only have this one screenshot. The question is of course how many of them were even gamers, how many would have purchased Cyberpunk 2077, as opposed to pirating it, and how many would have changed their decision to purchase the game had Devotion been released. In short, was the threat credible, or did the "Polish Stupid Ass" just get cold feet? Either way, it just wasn't a very smart move to promote Devotion's release in China like this.

Oh, but you do. In fact you just did. Earlier today you diagnosed me as "severely lacking in the brain department." But you don't know me, we've never met. This was the first and only thing you wrote in your response to my post: an interpretation you jumped to. You didn't really have enough facts to arrive at that interpretation, yet you did anyway.

Don't worry, we're all like that. In any real-life scenario we always have to deal with incomplete information. That's why we have deduction, induction, and other less rigorous problem-solving techniques, such as heuristics. Otherwise you could never leave home because you couldn't decide whether to take an umbrella with you as you didn't have enough facts to ascertain whether it's going to rain.

It's true if you completely don't care about an issue (like you claim is the case with you here) you could just sit it out and wait but that's a luxury we're rarely afforded in practice. And one could always claim to be waiting for more facts: after all, part of what we don't know is often not knowing how much we still don't know. This way anything could drag on forever, as long as we allowed it.

However, in this situation, while it would have been good to have even more information, I believe we have just enough of it to say what happened with near certainty. Further, my argument as to how this matter should be resolved is not derived from any facts pertaining to these particular events but based on general principles. So, while I might be willing to consider any more specific criticism, with regard to such elusive remarks I accept that at this point we might have to agree to disagree.

I didn't really feel the facts I presented were under attack. What I did think though was that you should have had a better version of events ready to present before criticizing mine, so I must say I am a bit disappointed.

Could it perhaps be a manifestation that nobody on the "opposite side," as you put it, feels that strongly about this issue after all?

For the record (as I said before), I only represent myself and do not co-ordinate my responses with anyone, so I'm not sure why you keep referring to me in the plural. I'm not aware of anybody else here presenting an argument that would be similar enough to mine to justify being lumped up together with them.

First of all, there are individual people posting here, everybody is responsible for themselves, so again I'm not sure how does "the Western community" come into it at all.

As a matter of fact, there were at least 4 different Chinese people posting here about this issue that I interacted with, and I believe I treated each of them well. While they faced criticism from many concurrent posters, I don't think it was anything out of the ordinary. That they eventually chose not to engage in further conversation is regrettable but perhaps, again, just a sign that they didn't feel that strongly about defending the issue in the first place. Alternatively, they could have found the counter-arguments they were presented with too difficult to refute: we don't really know unless we asked them, which we cannot do anymore. Speaking for myself, I believe I've demonstrated my willingness to discuss this matter with anyone, without any preconceptions, and in a polite manner, and thus have nothing to be ashamed about with regard to this situation.