What's your reaction to it ?
China seems like a great place to live, except for the fact that they're a full blown police and surveillance state magnitudes beyond 1984 and an inspiration for Black Mirror. Don't get me wrong; I've met some awesome people from China and I know there are a lot of beautiful places there, but if I were living there I would be doing everything in my power to get the hell out.
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Fortnite might be down to the fact you can kill people and then take their items. That doesn't happen on Overwatch.
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Why would anyone think this is good?
It's an oppressive regime crunching down on civil liberties, art and channels of communication.
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I know right, I was looking at the poll after voting and my jaw nearly hit the floor after seeing the majority vote was "I like it".
The asian gaming market is huge and if western companies start buckling to chinese demands to self-censor games to not lose out on sales(a very real danger...companies care more about their shareholders than you), this will have negative repercussions for gamers everywhere.
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Oh, trust me, every PUBG player in existence outside China would rejoice if Chinese would never be able to log back on.
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I mean that could also be solved by having them locked into Chinese servers.
I was looking at it from the perspective of the people not being able to access things.
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Yeah, the amount of Chinese hackers is appalling in that and other games. It’s ironic really when they don’t want you committing fraud in a game but then they literally don’t mind them cheating.
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There was an article in the NYT about the foreigners that China has been imprisoning.
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The day when Germany's institutions aren't the most trigger-happy regarding censoring video games... never woulda thought I'd see this ;>.
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Rainbow Six Siege is also a game of concern in China. IIRC in order to keep the chinese player base, Siege was/is going to remove blood stains, slot machines, etc. from the game. So China was not only screwing over their own players in censoring, China was also censoring everyone else in the world playing R6S.
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I do not know why this falsehood persists: Tencent has a share in Epic. Like in many other video game companies, including the one that makes PUBG. But it does not own most of those.
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I really wasn't expecting so many people on SG reacting favorably to this. Regardless of whether those games are good or not (I never played them, nor intend to), I fail to see why a government censoring videogames would be a good thing, particularly considering the reasons that are invoked.
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This "Online Ethics Review Committee" is just a red herring in name and a (not so clever) way of spindoctoring the government putting its foot down on liberties. It smacks of an oppressive regime not unlike that depicted in V for Vendetta.
edit: they even supposedly have planned a 'social credit score' system that can fuck with your life if you are not the good little sheep the government wants. yeah, that doesn't sound nefarious at all. more details in this video
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wtf
Overwatch
“game visuals [that] promote incorrect values”
Is that the best reason they could think of to get it banned? That probably describes bloody well everything, please be a translation error.
edit: No wait, cracked it -- they'll say Mei bears a resemblance to Winnie the Pooh, how could I be so stupid 🤦
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The Chinese government needs more money so they created that awesome "committee" to come up with some ludicrous reasons to ban games from big and wealthy companies. I'm not worried for Chinese players, arrangements will be made under the table.
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What may seem bad for us can be good for them. They have 1,417,514,350 people in their country and imagine how many teenagers are addicted to these games, because they are fun and there is nothing in them and your brain seeks for more information. In other hand they have big problems with propaganda. If china bans games it's going to hurt many gaming companies and instead of making cheap games they would need to start making quality games to reach the minimum what EU and NA wants.
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Banning games for sketchy reasons doesn't make more sense just because they have more people. There's other ways of handling game addiction and access, surely, if that's what they were trying to do.
And they're not: it's an "ethics" committee. Not a "responsible gaming" committee or something. This is just more Chinese dystopian mayhem.
Better quality control than Steam, tho :P
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I wonder who plays these games so they can know what's wrong with them. I mean, WoW has hundreds of hours of content. How do they even check everything for boobies "overly revealing female characters"? Weirdos.
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I'm surprised at the overwhelming votes on "I like it". Like a game or hate it, I don't think that censorship is ever a good thing. People should have a right to decide if something is or isn't right for them, as long as it doesn't involve heavily immoral/illegal activity. If a person wants to play a "gory" game, they should be allowed to do so of their own free will, not based on what one's government thinks is "ethical" to their perfect and ideal world. But well, it's my two cents. I'm not into politics much, especially foreign, so I can't speak for people who may have a more educated point of view on the topic.
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I am relatively sure that it is not about "oh, yeah, finally the game gets held back a bit with its cheap teen-grabbing themes" and more like "thank fuck I do not have to deal with Chinese in any of those games ever again". I am rather sure that if Russia enacted similar game bans, you would audibly hear the cheers on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Interesting perspective. I don't play much multiplayer games at all so I'm not aware of the... undesirable reputation the Chinese gaming community has within games.
And I thought mostly every multiplayer game matches you with people of your own country/continent?
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Search for "china numba wan" and I think you'll understand. Also, similarly how about th estimates put cheaters in CS:GO around 25-30% and the Russians among them anywhere between 50-99%, Chinese are the same in PUBG. YOu cannot open a PUBG related reddit page or YouTube channel without long compilations of Chinese players blatantly hacking the game without even trying to mask it.
At any rate, yes, China is supposed to play on Asia servers, but they usually go to EU and NA ones, especially since their ridiculous pings give them a large advantage in PUBG, thanks to its shoddy netcode.
The interesting thing is that there are games where Russians/Chinese act like responsible, mature players and can reach great results and ranks completely legit. So it is not like that someone from these countries is an automatic terrible player who complensates for the lack of skills with cheap cheats. It is CS:GO and PUNG and some similar games that simply attract these kinds of people, from all over the world. For example, I did not hear about Warframe having hacker problems, even though it has many nationalities in the player base.
(Then again again, it is a tad difficult to find any high-grade cheating software, especially paid one, where you cannot find leftover Cyrillic or Chinese characters…)
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I think it's terrible for the Chinese, but there's not much any of us can do about it. I'm also a little troubled by the possibility that Western developers will start self-censoring their games to steer clear of content that the Chinese government considers "problematic" because they don't want to lose sales.
And Paladins has "overly revealing female characters, blood and gore, and vulgar content"? I never bothered with that game before, but suddenly I have this odd urge to check it out. >.>
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