Hey guys for today’s blog post I wanted to talk about the Chinese influence on the video games industry. Late last year the gaming company Blizzard received quite a bite of public backlash for the way it handled a Political statement at their October 6th Hearthstone Grand master’s tournament. The TL;DR version of the story is that the champion, @blitzchungHS had his title and prize money stripped for supporting the Hong Kong protests. For people who would like to learn more the video produce by Inside Gaming elaborates into more of the specific.
As for the reason this happened it is speculated that the companies share holder Tencent, a Chinese tech giant, had influence in the decision to ban Blitzchung and act the way that blizzard did. Gaming, especially mobile gaming for hearthstone, is a huge market in china. A point cited by the video, in order to exist in this ecosystem companies have to appease the Chinese government.
For all its faults I believe that the situation is much more convoluted than it lends itself to be through this video. Taking common business practices outside their own individual cultural contexts it has inherent value clashes between what the Chinese people think is normal and what the western world think is normal.