Really? Ok then. Try emailing Gabe. See what you get? Or anyone at EA/Ubi/Sony/MS.
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Unlike Blizzard, Epic Games (partially owned by Chinese company Tencent) says it won’t ban players for political speech
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Really? Ok then. Try emailing Gabe. See what you get? Or anyone at EA/Ubi/Sony/MS.
Because Activision needs the promise of growth - sizable growth, and soon - to boost their share prices. This is what happens when the Chinese marketplace is threatened at the tail end of a year that knocked $30 off their shares.
You're the one concerned about their response. Go for it.
But you seem more critical at Tim actually positive response then the silence from the rest of the industry... which is strange imo.
Do you really think no one has? That they are just waiting for someone to ask? Really?
JFC. The insane hoops you will jump through to convince yourself that someone is evil just because they moneyhatted some exclusive games. Holy hell.
I'd eat my hat if Phil Spencer or Jim Ryan came out in support of the HK protests. Could you imagine if China shut down all Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo factories? That would be the true test if gamers care more about human rights than their consoles.
I get the inherent distrust of any and all corporations. But don't play up the Tencent angle without first looking into the actual nature of ownership. I think people playing the Tencent angle when talking about Blizzard are inadvertently absolving Blizzard of some responsibility, because it becomes the big bad Chinese corporation strong arming the company. Which doesn't look to be the case. And since Tim is the majority owner, he can say what he wants without fear of repercussions.
I think Ubisoft is the only company that stood-up against censoring requests from China until now.
They still censor the game in china if you mean siege, they were going to censor the game worldwide so they wouldn't have to make two versions, and fan backlash made them walk it back. Not the same thing.
We're in a thread about Tim. Honestly given the type of stuff he spews on a regular basis, I just don't buy it. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm very skeptical.
As for the rest of the industry, sure - I'd love to hear what they have to say. I'm sure a good chunk of the industry would be afraid to upset China.
I remember them censoring Rainbow Six Siege to the point where it would affect everyone, to please China. There was an uproar and they reversed course, but I'm not sure that was standing up against China. Did the Chinese version remain censored?
Was there something else?
Sweeny is still the majority shareholder, right? As long as that is the case I'll take the man at his word.
Nope. They literally changed entire maps in Rainbow Six to appease China (removing all items considered offensive by China). A severe shitstorm is what it took for them to undo it.
No one is gonna say what Epic games did. Not Ubi, not EA, not Valve and certainly not Sony/MS/Nintendo. Which is why this gesture from Epic is worth applauding. Apparently not on ERA though.
Fair point. Thought Ubisoft got pressured to apply the censorship on a world-wide level, but seems they were just too "lazy" to have two different builds and therefore planned to apply the censoring also to the non-chinese version. Damn. Guess that happens if you want to praise Ubi once.
Do people not know how business works? Tencent invested money back then for a stake in Epic. They aren't constantly giving them money. The only thing they would be helping with Epic is trying to get into the Chinese Market.
Anyone who's worked in game dev immediately knew exactly why Ubisoft was trying to maintain parity.
It's a massive headache to maintain separate versions of your products, especially for competitive games. There's nothing lazy about it.
Epic can think their shit don't stink, but let Tencent show up at the next board meeting and decide to squeeze some nuts.
Nuts will be squeezed. 40% share is not a fuckin game.
Nuts will be squeezed. 40% share is not a fuckin game.
Most people aren't interested in putting their livelihood in jeopardy. Certainly not the bread-winners on these streaming platforms.
The engineering decisions don't really change the outcome though, which is that the Chinese government's censorship policies were affecting international gamers. Ubisoft has more than enough money and person power to deal with massive headaches. They do it cross platform all the time.
Unless you're familiar with Ubi's level design tools, I don't think you can say for sure that they can guarantee parity between different maps. Maintaining the exact same changes to two different maps sounds like a nightmare.
Also, the goal is always to look for efficient ways to handle your problems. Ubi having a lot of resources doesn't mean they're going to default to inefficient methods. In fact, the most efficient method is to design with an international audience in mind in the first place, which is what most game companies looking to operate in China do nowadays anyway.
Yeah, but they didn't. Instead, they decided to very obviously throw the customers in their home countries under the bus in the name of efficiency and their customers reacted accordingly.
Pretty harsh language there for a very innocuous set of changes.
Unlike what most people seem to think, the solution to every problem isn't just to hire more people and throw them on a project.
It seems silly to me that the R6S community wants their slot machines and neon stripper signs so badly they'd riot. Or is it just for the principle of things?
Boy, the first page of this thread is extremely depressing.
I am glad I am not as jaded and cynical as some people on this forum. Holy shit. There are protestors being shot and people are co-opting this moment in history to say snarky things about companies they don't like.
Between this, Blizzard, the NBA, Donald Trump... Jesus.
I am glad I am not as jaded and cynical as some people on this forum. Holy shit. There are protestors being shot and people are co-opting this moment in history to say snarky things about companies they don't like.
Between this, Blizzard, the NBA, Donald Trump... Jesus.
The announcement literally said they valued "reducing the duplication of work" over existing players experiencing the game as it was envisioned (and released), then proceeded to show in stark detail how the laws of authoritarian governments halfway across the globe would affect their current playerbase. How would you expect people to react?
Also, none of the language used ("address issues more quickly", "we only need to do the work once") suggests an insurmountable engineering problem and as stated above, they are already maintaining three separate builds of the entire game. Given that, I'm pretty unsympathetic to the difficulties of any developer trying to break into that market.
Would you express the same sentiment if it was your own government dictating that they don't appear in video games?
that's not how it works. As long as they don't have a controlling interest, they can't squeeze any nuts.
Vivendi once had a 27% stake in Ubisoft and couldn't influence jack. And Arsenal football club fans know How Alisher Usmanov - as merely the second largest shareholder - was completely sidelined from major decisions.
It's unlikely this is a problem solvable through engineering.
This is almost certainly a matter of their level design tools. I'm guessing that each time they make changes to something like level geometry, they have to go into the master international version and make the changes there first, then delete the offending assets and replace them with the Chinese assets and save that into its own file. Like I said, it sounds like an awful thing to maintain, and it probably isn't going to warrant a tech solution... which means some poor level designer is probably wasting his time. And if it's a level design tool problem, there's no reason it'd affect their existing builds, as it's previously been the same level exported across all builds.
I mean, I've worked on products that had to be localized for the Chinese market. It's an assload of work. So I'm personally very sympathetic.
1. This doesn't address the moral questions that were the thrust of my post at all
2. Grunt level designer labor sounds exactly like the type of task you can "hire more people and throw them on a project" for
3. My unsympathies were directed towards the company as a whole, not any individual employee. Some boring grunt work is a pretty small price to pay for a market of a billion people
At the end of the day, committing to a single global experience means catering to the lowest common denominator in terms of allowed content. This is turn allows a motivated government (ie CCP) to effectively export their own values onto the rest of the world. If you think that's worth it for the sake of good software engineering practices, so be it.
You (and the R6S) community are making a mountain out of a molehill. Ubi clearly didn't think changing a few assets would upset the playerbase, so they made a decision they felt would be more sustainable for development (an aside--this isn't just about "boring grunt work"--it's about best practices to maintain an important asset in a competitive game, minimizing risk, and improving work efficiency). This is a really normal thing to do in day-to-day operations, and wouldn't invoke second thought. When the community got upset, they acquiesced. It honestly probably wasn't that big a deal for them either; I'm just trying to explain why they defaulted to what they did.
And no, I have no moral qualms with this. You learn to design around it, as they will surely do going forward. In the end, if you absolutely want to make a product that can't operate in China without breaking artistic integrity, then it's clearly not a product that's suitable for that market. But I think it's silly to say that Clubhouse without slot machines and neon stripper signs is one that lacked artistic integrity.
That's basically 100%, right?