Isn't that "standard" today? What you don't like, you just put a negative label on it and discredit this group, so that you don't really need to deal with what the other group has to say. Just name it "stupid" or "dumb" or the like and one can go on to the next "problem". Easy as that.

This isn't about rules, it's about values and it's about trust. It's true that the other storefronts aren't carrying this game. GOG told Red Candle that they would and then immediately changed their minds once the news was out. And they had the absolute disrespect to claim this was at the behest of "the gamers". Really this was about one man's ego and his ability to control access to his nation's commerce. Just because I understand why they made this decision doesn't mean I have to ever respect or buy from them again as they're willing to stab developers in the back and say it's what their customers like me and you want. They want to blacklist on behalf of ccp that's on them.

But that's just it, we are talking about 2 different things. The values are wrong and I agree with you, I have even made it clear that I am 100% for free speech multiple times.

However we are not talking about the morality of this situation, but the facts. And the facts are that a meme in an obscure game from a Taiwanese developer whose main market is China would not change the world because they dared to call a dictator with a weird beef with a cartoon bear Winnie the Poo. They are still free to do it, but then they must expect the consequences of those actions and it isn't for GOG or Steam to bear that responsability.

Where I agree with you 100% is that CDPR's actions were just plain stupid and dishonest. If they were ready to take the heat and lose the chinese market then they should have gone all in, but they werent and the results were to be expected. This was a stupid decision by management, as its becoming quite standard apparently, not a morality issue because it was never a morality issue - GOG is a company and they keep their lights on withmoney, not good actions.

But they have made these stupid decisions before, with that regional pricing refund thing which barely anyone noticed or even discussed. It wasn't elevated to this degree of dishonesty or immorality like this is being portraied - it was a business decision, a stupid one, but not a moral one. No one cared because this is just what happens when you have stupid people in charge - but it has become a whole thing about morality because it is popular to shit on CDPR now so that's what people are going with.

I'll bet they didn't blame their own customers in a tweet last time. That's what really sticks in my craw.

I think GOG deciding to lie that it was "many gamers" was a moral and business decision. Actually, an immoral one.

Only two comments

GOG's owners really put their foot in it. Cyberpunks mess (does it sound reasonable companies should be testing their games as much as possible before release?. alpha/beta's?. how long had this game been in development? .I havent followed the development but really they should have kept the media hyper to a minimal and not place pressure on themselves to get something out the door which wasnt ready).

Devotion mess -- well the PR department really didnt use their brains and just dropped a goose eggs. The whole bending over for China business needs to stop - every company. yes China is big. Yes China unfortunately has a lot of money (well the elite 1% unfortunately) to blow. Way too much influence.. but companies and customer to a point only have themselves to blame. Which comes around to CDPR. Who are the actual investors people claim they need to keep happy?. Are they that important ???. So bloody what if some chinese bots....i mean gamers get upset?. Those toolbags in China threw out an upsetting tweet @ aussies (google it) recently and refused to take it down - does this mean its ok for them to be negative and not right for others to make fun of them?. oh man......

It's more of the fact that upsetting the wrong people can have massive consequences. If China's government wanted to, they could ban GOG entirely, damaging CDPR's customer base. CDPR have never done a game as ambitious as CP2077, apart from the Witcher 3, and both had issues at launch. People have got to realize that it's to be expected cause CDPR is just another company like Bioware or 2K and shouldn't be treated as the second coming of Christ, although CDPR have done a lot of good supporting their games well after release, but the matter with Devotion is that it upset people, and to avoid further trouble, they did what they thought was best and removed it so the Chinese government wouldn't lose their shit. I also believe CDPR's way of handling the situation and choice of words was very poor but it's better than starting an outrage with a whole nother country. At the end of the day, freedom of speech is great but if you purposely include something in your game to poke fun at someone who won't take kindly to it, well thats on you mate.

If you have to ask if the investors are important, you either don't understand a lot about business or are just too naive. CDPR is a publicly traded company in the polish stock market and has a multitude of stockholders and no doubt a slew of other private investors. Just to get an idea of how powerful these are, the stockholders own 66% of the company which means that they have the final say when it comes to major decisions and most likely can fire senior leadership through vote.

So say that you are one of these stockholders. You have about 3 million dollars in this company and have recently bought 5 million more dollars because this fancy game they were about to release was one of (if not the most) hyped game of all time. You are expecting the company to make big bucks and the stock to rise by a good ammount. But oh shit, the game comes out and its basically unplayable for its biggest market - consoles. And oh shit, it's actually not as good as people thought so it's getting review bombed. And oh shit, the stock is down 30% and I just lost 2.4 million dollars when you were expecting to make at least that in profit from your last minute investment... So you go along and obviously the market goes up and down and you sit down in an emergency meeting for all investors where the idiotic management for that game try to portray themselves as the victims and 'take responsibility' and you are told that they are working on it and things will get better. Okay, you are stil pissed at the money lost but you hold to your shares and wait for feb to come along. But oh shit again - the game was just removed from Playstation, which is just embarassing and makes you really concerned for the ability for the company to make as much money in the long term as they promised they would make, and then the refunds, refunding all ps purchases was not going to be cheap, how much would this cost? So because you are a greedy investor cunt you worry about losing your precious millions and all of the sudden you start hearing a buzz about an unknown obscure taiwanese game being published in their platform... and that it was a game that was banned from other storefronts for pissing off China... Now how would you feel, if you were that greedy investing cunt, if after all of this you were about to lose one of the biggest markets for video-games on earth because of some unknown game from an unknown publisher?

Imagine this multiplied by all of those that have their nose in the pie, and you can imagine the flurry of screaming phonecalls the idiots at CDPR's senior management team actually go? Now consider that many investors will no doubt be Chinese or with ties to China, and would have to stop working with gog if they pressed on with that decision. It was obvious what was going to happen and only the same idiots that released Cyberpunk now could have thought about it....

I actually think that whoever is making these decisions should just be fired and someone with an actual understanding of how business works should come along. Cyberpunk should have been delayed for about 1-2 years to a point where they can work like normal people and not be overworked and abused. And the idiots that continue to come up with ideas like regional pricing, gog connect, etc. should be fired so they stop trying to appease a need that isn't there,.

I'm second guessing but I've worked in the financial industry for a good ammount of years to know that this is basically how it works - something is about to lose money, investors scream at the people doing it, and hte action stops. Quite simple.
100%

There is no "avoid further trouble" with the communists. It's not like they show you their law and say, please don't violate these items again, then we'll be fine. Instead, they get their feelings hurt and demand your action to unhurt their feelings. Until the next time they want you to, say divulge all addresses of Uighur players to unhurt their feelings.

As long as you self-identify as a CCP plaything, they will invent some further trouble that you must fix. The CCP's whole business with you is to invent further trouble when they want you to comply.

100% agree with you, but you don't fight a communist regime by putting a shitpost in a medium literally made for that country.

You fight tiranny through diplomacy and a heavy steel hand if needed. I can give you a concrete example of when this worked - China has had a massive issue with pollution and a lot of people are developing illnesses because of it. A lot of outrage due to lack of resolution on the issue started to rise up on social media and the CCP feared that people actually revolted so they actually started programmes and are looking more and more into renewable solutions to their energy needs. The fear of public outrage did that, not calling the guy a name.

Everyone should be forever critical of the launch of an unfinished game and the unfinished launch of a game.
Without the "toxic community" of people who spend money on videogames, there will be no GOG.

How did you even reached the conclusion that I was criticising the reviews for Cyberpunk?

I've been criticizing it myself in almost every post, however because CDPR cocked up this one it doesn't mean they became EA, it just means they cocked up and need to work on that, probably by canning the guys at the top making these shit decisions. But now youtubers have decided every fart CDPR gives is a news worthy topic that confirms how bad the bad bad CDPR is.

Trust me, this will be just like Bethesda when they cocked up hard with Fallout 76 and it ended up with them being ridiculed because a shitty rum company made a shitty rum bottle... Every time CDPR does something can can be twisted in any way into a negative the slimy youtubers will cover it as another evidence CDPR is bad and everyone will riddicule CDPR for it

True. They were EA all along.

Yeah, a company that wants to make money... Shocker

What should distinguish them is their practices and GOG is miles better than EA so far. But at its core CDPR is still a company and profits are its main concern