Ex-World of Warcraft developer's thread about China and the gaming industry

What meeting can they possibly have had where the options were "Just reprimand him in private" or "Ban him, get into the news cycle and face weeks of public backlash" and they landed on the latter?

It's hard to imagine the decision wasn't almost completely fuelled by Tencent's part ownership of Blizzard and Blizzard's stated goal to expand their marketshare in China. If so, it devolved from a company increasingly known for just poor decisions and communication (mobile Diablo announcement anyone?) to a company that publicly and blatantly prioritises shareholder interests over ethics.

And let's be frank; there's not that much anyone can do about it. People can claim they're uninstalling Blizzard games. And I'm sure some do. But the next time they release an objectively good game everyone's back in.

The rule in question is

>Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image

Which is so open ended that it's impossible to not break it if you have an opinion and are speaking to a global audience. You could go up on stage and say "It's bad to murder people for being gay" and a portion or group of the public in some other countries would get offended about it.

But Blizzard wouldn't be banning people and taking their prize money for that. 100% this is about Tencent and Blizzard's access to the Chinese market.

You are a professional player in a tournament, you should not use an official stream to spew political opinions... or opinions of any other kind.

https://overwatchleague.com/en-us/news/23013827/

Blizzard was fine introducing politics into their competitions when it suited them to do so. In that case it made them look progressive and they sold a lot of pins and t-shirts. In this case, they could lose a whole bunch of money.

Their stance on this sort of thing isn't consistent unless you view it from the angle of "what will make Blizzard money?" They also went completely nuclear on this guy by taking his winnings and banning him for a year, not to mention firing the two commentators.

I said essentially the same thing in another thread yesterday, but the issue at hand here isn't whether or not Blizzard has the right to enforce some vague rule; it's whether or not they should have and what were their motivations. We need to be very careful about allowing China to dictate what we can see and hear in our media.

These companies are quite literally helping an authoritarian government to further oppress its people, and their only motivation is money. It's insane to me that so many people are arguing in Blizzard's favor because apparently the only thing that matters is the bottom line, integrity be damned.

I fail to see how this could be your takeaway from his statement. His point is that they will pander to whatever cause makes them the most amount of money.

LGBTQ+ content in a game should not be the reason you don't want a game. There are games that handle it very poorly and are just trying to virtue-signal. They make the point of the game that the character is gay (generally a lesbian as that hits more checkboxes) and as a result these games suffer quality wise. Being non-binary isn't a good story, your media should have a good story. The character having "being gay" as one of their character traits is fine. "Being gay" isn't (far from it) the only thing that defines a person (or character)