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.

"God hates gays" in particular, yes, I think they would be justified in dropping the banhammer on that. Blizzard has gone out of their way to promote inclusivity and diversity with Overwatch (which has two canonically gay main characters), even though it pissed off some of their more conservative fanbase. Having people on stream coming out against that runs pretty directly counter to the politics that Blizzard has already been promoting.

What it comes down to is that I expect Blizzard to have a system of values guiding their decision on this, and I want those values to line up with mine - everyone gets human rights, democracy is preferable to authoritarianism, freedom to protest a corrupt government is an essential right, etc.

Some people would probably call it a double standard to let players support pro-democracy protests, but not support anti-gay ones. I'd just call that having standards. It's 2019 and we're talking about a game studio based in southern California.

Maybe that's a self-centered view of mine, expecting a corporation to support western values just because they're based in the US and composed almost entirely of American employees. But that's where I'm coming from.

Blizzard is an international company, and the line they draw is based on the sensibilities of all their customers worldwide. China, a country with a population 3-4x larger than the US evidently believes that support for Hong Kong protestors crosses that line. Blizzard may be a US based company, that doesn't mean it's going to draw up standards of conduct that always please the US customer base. I can guarantee you, the US and other western customers they stand to lose is they didn't cater to Chinese demands is a lot less than the Chinese customers they would lose if they were kicked out of China.

>China, a country with a population 3-4x larger than the US evidently believes that support for Hong Kong protestors crosses that line

The Chinese government, you mean, which happens to fall squarely into the "oppressive authoritarian" bucket as regimes go. Let's not pretend that the CPC is an honest representation of the people.

It's not only about "pleasing the US customer base", it's about integrity. Not every situation is some abstract hypothetical; it's pretty clear what's going on here, and I don't think any reasonable person would conclude that kowtowing to the Chinese im the pursuit of profit is a good thing.