The last few days I have teetered back and forth on whether or not I really wanted to make a post on this. I ask you to read this in its entirety before passing judgement on me personally. There is a fine line to walk between sounding like a corporate apologist and sounding like a xenophobe. Please note I am by no means an expert in foreign affairs but I do try my best to be a student of current events and of history. I feel like I need to preface this with a brief history lesson. On Midnight of July 1st in 1997 Hong Kong as a territory moved from British Rule to being governed by the mainland of China. There are numerous sources of information about this change if you are interested.
As part of the agreements from this hand over was the establishment of the Hong Kong Basic Law, that was intended to allow for business to continue as normal in that territory, and for the residents to maintain its legislation as part of a special administrative region (SAR). This was supposed to extend for a period of 50 years to allow for a peaceful transition from living under the British Commonwealth to whatever the new system of government would be. The ideal being that the citizens of Hong Kong in this SAR would maintain a certain degree of self rule along with the promise of universal suffrage and the ability to elect their own officials.
Certain aspects of this Basic Law never quite were implemented and in the 22 years since the handover of power, a number of these rights have been sufficiently diluted. This all leads to the situation we have today where protesters have been active on the streets of Hong Kong since March. Initially this was a protest seeking the withdrawal of an extradition law that would potentially open up Hong Kong residents to the jurisdiction of the Chinese mainland. As the protests have gone on they have morphed into a huge ball of issues from police brutality to the restoration of some of those rights that have been eroded, to more recently a demand of full universal suffrage.
Now moving forward we have the current situation. On October 6th during an official Blizzard Hearthstone Grandmasters series stream the player “Blitzchung” aka Ng Wai Chung gave a statement over the broadcast in support of the Hong Kong protestors. The exact statement translated was “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our age!”. During this the streamers seemingly knew it was coming and ducked down beneath their desks while he was saying it, and immediately went to commercial after that.
The VOD of this stream was scrubbed and various copies of it have been taken down from YouTube. Who knows how long the above video will be available but at the time of writing this represents a copy of the sequence. Following the event Blizzard used a section of the official Hearthstone Grandmaster Competition rules to claw back any earnings from the player that had yet to be collected, and also as a result both of the commentators were fired. Shortly after this, Blizz posted the above questionable response on the official Chinese language only Weibo account.
During a stream on Tuesday night, three collegiate competitors from American University in Washington D.C. held up a sign in solidarity. The sign above simply says “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz”, and extremely rapidly the camera was cut away from that match leading to some very nervous discussion from the commentators. Once again the stream has been scrubbed from the official twitch account and is only available through third party sources on YouTube. Most recently as I sit here tonight and write this, signs are pointing that Blizzard is taking action to try and disable players from deleting their account data in protest.
The situation keeps escalating and we still have yet to see a reasonable response from Blizzard on this. The problem that I keep struggling with is that I can absolutely see how we end up in a situation like this. The entertainment industry and video games specifically have an addiction to Chinese investment. This situation is escalated by the fact that many Chinese companies have been earning wealth at a frightening pace and have little to no legitimate places to invest that money in mainland China.
The main way of ensuring wealth for the long term has been in real estate, and there are legitimately ghost towns full of high rise buildings and apartments that will likely never seen tenants. Those who have the means have been parking that money in as many foreign investments as they can, which only serves to further the “Belt and Road” initiative of the Chinese government. Along with actual tangible infrastructure, a lot of this money is funneling into supporting video game companies.
One of the first responses that I saw yesterday was from the Destiny community, giving a sign of relief that they are thankful for the move to Steam and away from the Battle.net launcher. However Bungie has also accepted a large investment from NetEase the same Chinese company that is collaborating with Blizzard on Diablo Immortal. The truth is there really isn’t a large games company on the market right now that does not have at least some significant investment from a company that hails from mainland China.
Perfect World, Tencent and NetEase are massive players in a lot of competing game markets. What is probably more concerning is that I have watched over the last two days and the coverage by the enthusiast press seems fairly anemic at best, and non-existent at worst. I am seeing a constantly flow of this on my social feeds, but generally speaking the articles have covered only the strict facts with little to no condemnation of the actions. The same entities that have been pouring money into game studios, also represent a significant share of the advertisers willing to take out those massive full page ads.
To deal with one of these Chinese companies is to at least in some way deal with the politics of the Chinese government. On some level every modern game sold in the Chinese region has made some measure of concessions to appease or placate. This can be something like referring to Taiwan as Chinese Taipei to keep from offending the “One-China Policy”, or it could be removing all bones from games and replacing them with fleshy patches like is in the case of the Chinese World of Warcraft client. Offending the government means that more than likely your games will be pulled from that region and eventually the source of investment money begins drying up.
All of this said… I absolutely understand why Blizzard did what it did. It was a knee jerk reaction and in doing so they misjudged how much gamers would care about it. I can understand why something happens and still consider it to be the wrong call. As I said before there is an addiction to Chinese investment in the entertainment industry. It isn’t a Video Game problem, but one significantly larger. Ultimately these companies are going to have to make a decision as to whether or not their own corporate values are worth sullying to keep the cash flowing. They are also going to have to decide just how many existing customers they can alienate in the process.
As I said at the beginning of this, I have been on the fence about how to react to this. As the day went on today and more examples of this nonsense started flowing out, my mind was made up for me. Unfortunately my subscription recently renewed so any protest I might make is going to seem a bit weak considering I just paid for 6 months of World of Warcraft subscription last week. I am also not going to delete my account, because that seems a little extreme at this point because I would only be hurting myself in the process. I am however going to halt progress in World of Warcraft Classic and going to similarly stop writing about it. Equally for the time being I am going to stop buying anything Blizzard related.
The parting thought that I want to leave you with however is that this was a decision made at a corporate level more than likely by investor relations flacks. The line of business employees just want to keep doing what they love and keep making video games. Please don’t take your anger towards the actions of Blizzard and project it on their employees. They are good people and do not deserve the shit storm of hatred that is about to be heaped upon them. Be kind and gentle and find ways to express your displeasure in a sane and rational manner. I fully support the boycott of Blizzard products, just don’t make the lives of these good people trying their best to support you into hell.
