Because if Gog sold this game anywhere in the world the Chinese government would punish them by preventing Gog from doing business in China. This is a huge market. A large slice of the sales of Cyberpunk 2077 will come from the Chinese market.

Don't you remember, I lent you some just last week?
I ham hoping to get them back before the end of the month.
If you borrowed from me it is quite possible you did from China as well before.
I don't think people dispute this but they certainly don't like it because it means throwing all principles aside for cash.

And it's not even good cash. CCP can instantly close off the 1.4 billion people market to you if you dare hesitate about its whims. If you have invested anything in China, or have made any profit in RMB (Chinese yuan), you're not getting them out unless CCP lets you.

I don't care who they do business with, in china follow china's laws outside of china don't. Otherwise, everyone is ruled by china what's so hard to understand?

That's normal that if you want to sell games in China you have to follow China's rules. What isn't normal is China dictating that a store based in Europe can't sell games to people in Europe, the Americas, etc, when neither the people buying the games, the store selling the games or the people who made the game are "mainland Chinese". That should not become normalized at all.

Let's flip it around. Let's say The Isle of Man splits off from Great Britain. A small game studio based on the Isle of Man makes a horror game. Inside that game is one single visual joke poking fun at the British Prime Minister's infamous haircut. Britain responds by demanding the game be banned worldwide, not just inside Britain but, eg, demanding that unless a Chinese game store not sell the game to not only China but everywhere else, eg, Malaysia, Thailand, etc, the entire store gets banned for business for every unrelated game to every unrelated country. This is exactly what gets labelled "throwing your weight around" or "imperialism" (but only when "the west" do it). When China does it, it's apparently "good business or something". The hypocrisy is staggering...

Guess I hit the nail on the head hmm?

Also lmao at Taiwanese redneck as if you couldn't be more wrong

This reminds me of the thread "when is enough, 'enough'"... and yes, I choose moments like this to express what I think, but I've always done that anyway.

-nm, not relevant-

I don't live in China and there are no laws here that ban the use of Winnie-the-Pooh in video games.

But yet I'm being subjected to Chinese censorship? Why? Because the leader of the CCP has been described before to look like Winnie-the-Pooh.

Plenty of companies out there that do indeed do business in China and release games there subject to their laws. But yet those companies don't wholesale change their products outside China. Film companies also do this.

That is a very narrow way of looking at things, friend, though you are technically right. Money is just a construct to facilitate trade in general and policy and development at state level. Much of the success of free-market communism in China is very much owed to the success of liberal capitalism in the USA - China gives cheap labor to facilitate the influx of knowledge and the growth of local industry (and to gain leverage in other matters, of course). As much as they pose as enemies, the USA and China depend on each other in a strange form of symbiosis for a number of things.

Oh, come on. Not trying to satisfy China at the every step of the way doesn't mean you can't do business there. EA made Battlefield 4, a game about democratic revolution in China. Yes, the game was banned in China, but EA still released game and still does business in China.

It's kinda shocking to see EA having a stronger backbone than CD Projekt.

The thing is. I can understand Western companies following Chinese rules when they are doing business IN CHINA. Yes, it's an authoritarian government and they want to control stuff. I don't like the system, but it's up to the Chinese people themselves if they want to change the system they live under or not.

My problem is when companies bring Chinese censorship to the rest of the world like in blocking Devotion from gamers all over the world. We don't even know if CD Projekt actually received any pressure from Chinese government itself or if they just crapped themselves at the thought of maybe doing something that might offend Chinese government and decided to pre-emptively self-censor themselves. Which would be even worse than giving up to actual pressure.

Whatever the reason, they should have had the backbone to stand by the developers and release the game for audience outside of China. If Chinese people at the other side of the world don't like the game because of one stupid joke, fine, but it doesn't mean I should have my freedom of choice limited because of it.

Which may be why GoG decided to back out of this (admittedly in the worst way possible).
They do have a backbone but it's simply not strong enough (like EAs) to be able to take and compensate for (and even survive) potential significant blowback, in whatever form.

The Chinese being the undisputed world/universal champions of holding a grudge seems to be a real problem, imho.
Do something that offends them, even just in the most subtlest and non-troversial of ways and, like an elephant, they seemingly will never forget nor forgive, even if you apologize over and over again.

I wouldn't say so. They are drowning in cash. Recently they bought a lot of government bonds from US, CH and PL, because they don't know what to do with cash. They did it even though they pay dividend on regular basis, did stock buy backs this year and they released last game 5 years ago. They had strong positive cashflow even though they were producing their most expensive game to date.

Now, after success of Cyberpunk that paid for itself weeks BEFORE launch I imagine they have even more money. CD Projekt is not little guy anymore. It's huge corporation that before Cyberpunk fiasco was worth more than Ubisoft.