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How do you respond when a character from your top grossing game is turned into a political meme? This is what Blizzard has been learning this week. How do you

How do you respond when a character from your top grossing game is turned into a political meme? This is what Blizzard has been learning this week. How do you handle potentially thousands of attendees, at your organization's biggest annual event, turning it into a platform for political protest agaisnt your biggest growing market? There's three possible events: BlizzCon is canceled. Extremely unlikely but possible. Blizzard attempts to control the narrative during the con by policing the floors to extinguish any mention of china or Hong Kong. Stripping those who do of their con membership. Leading to more negative reactions from domestic users. Blizzard does nothing. Thousands of videos and photos flood the web of blizzcon of what looks like a sanctioned public protests by the company. China responds by blocking all Blizzard products in their country. This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created, no real way they will win.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created How do you figure they created it?
- CocaKoala 7y ago
  If they had just not done anything when blitzchung made his statement in support of Hong Kong, it likely would have gotten essentially zero media play.
  - belltaco 7y ago
    Wrong, it would have got huge media play in China as Blizzard not enforcing its rules in opposition to China. Just like the NBA issue.
    - Lazare 7y ago
      Highly debatable. It's by no means clear the rules should have been applied to this case; they were very vague "we can ban anyone for anything that makes us look bad", but what has made Blizzard look bad here has primarily been the enforcement of the rules. If they had just played it off as the players speech, and nothing to do with them at all, it is by no means clear any significant blowback would have stuck to Blizzard. The NBA issue is very different because the original tweet was from the general manager of a team with close Chinese ties. It's like if a Blizzard exec had expressed pro-human rights sentiments in an interview. Obviously we'll never know now, but Blizzard did so much to increase the perceived importance of the event beyond where it would naturally have been (eg, their statement on an official account saying they would always "resolutely safeguard [China's] national dignity"). Once you've framed it in those terns, it's hard to back down. Were there really no alternatives though?
    - kmonsen 7y ago
      Only if China decided to do so. They can pick a fight about anything they want to, so there is really no avoiding that.
      - khuey 7y ago
        For further evidence of that, look at what happened to Lotte, a Korean conglomerate that was essentially banned from China for the crime of having previously owned land that the Korean government used for a military purpose that China did not like.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I haven't followed the situation closely, but we never get to A/B test such decisions. We make a decision and see the outcome for which one we chose. Saying they created this situation is a little like blaming a casualty of war for living in the country they were born in. China exists and it's a large country with growing power that has fundamental cultural differences with the West and always has. There may be better and worse ways to respond, but we have to recognize that everyone is, to some extent, just a bit player on a world stage where many other forces are in play. Not everything that happens in our lives is a thing we directly caused. It's common to take it for granted when the existing world stage benefits us and wonder where we went wrong when it shafts us. Both views are only partial explanations at best.
    - wbl 7y ago
      This isn't a fundamental cultural difference. This is a tyranny that brokes no dissent and murders its people to stay in power.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        I took History of The Far East in college decades ago. The cultural friction between China and the West substantially precedes the current government of the country. Regardless of what is going on there politically currently, they are a growing economic power. That makes them the proverbial 800 pound gorilla that people are increasingly afraid of pissing off for fear of financial consequences. They have one seventh of the world's population. It's a huge market that simply cannot be ignored.
        cthalupa 7y ago
        >It's a huge market that simply cannot be ignored. True, if your motive is profit above all else. Otherwise, it is quite simple to ignore China's demands. Create the products, services, etc. that you want to create. If people in China buy them, fine. If China says they'll buy them if only you do Thing X, if you do not morally agree with Thing X, simply do not do it. There are near limitless numbers of businesses that are economically viable without catering to China's demands.
  - detaro 7y ago
    Or just not went as overboard with it. Doing something might have been a good idea to still send a message (both to China and to players to please not repeat it), the tricky bit is not looking unreasonable while doing so. (e.g. certainly not rescind the price money)
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    But Blizzard would likely have lost access to the Chinese market.
- ncallaway 7y ago
  They banned a player and stripped their prize-money for speaking out in favor of HK. They did this in order to try and maintain access to Chinese markets, probably assuming that the US market wouldn't care.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    They banned him because he spoken about politics which have nothing with video games. I don't think that they tried to censor exactly HK speech. I guess they would have banned him if he would talk about Putin as well.
    - danharaj 7y ago
      I believe that you believe that, but I'm here to tell you that your counterfactual is not realistic.
      - belltaco 7y ago
        The same pro player had expressed his HK independence support on his social media in the past, yet was allowed to play.
    - Lazare 7y ago
      You reckon they'd have banned him if he'd worn a Elizabeth Warren campaign badge? Really? Like...that's a thing you honestly can imagine?
      - belltaco 7y ago
        Yes, because if unpunished, in the next game that will cause another player to wear a MAGA hat. And another to wear a shirt saying "ICE is just doing it's job". They cannot punish those guys because it will make them look biased. And it's all downhill from there.
        tareqak 7y ago
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  They chose to be involved with China, who has been infamous for demands like this.
- Latty 7y ago
  All these companies should refuse to self-censor for China. China does want western media and products. The fact that companies capitulate makes that the standard practice, and means China feels safe demanding it (or doesn't even need to because of the chilling effect). They can make a spectacle of any one company that refuses. I'm not saying that China wouldn't just ban them all, but it would at least mean there is a cost to China in doing it. Yeah, that's putting profit at risk, 100%. That's precisely why it's so important that western audiences tell these companies that they'll loose western business if they capitulate—it has to be made the economic least-bad option to stand up to China for it to be common. They created the situation by capitulating. Yeah, it turns out morals are at odds with profits. Who'd have guessed.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > China does want western media and products. Does it? It seems like China replicates products that are inconvenient to get otherwise.
    - magashna 7y ago
      Quite a few Hollywood movies have made billions in China. This year alone, 3 US movies are in the top 10 grossing movies there, and they made about 7B
      - sushid 7y ago
        And those are very heavily self-censored.
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    You can't totally blame Blizzard. It's a Nash equilibrium, right?
  - mensetmanusman 7y ago
    China has shown they will steal the source code and create a ‘home grown’...
  - 7y ago
fouc 7y ago
Blizzard could remove all Blizzard signs and advertising. Make the conference look unofficial.
- krustyburger 7y ago
  I can’t tell if you’re serious.
- avischiffmann 7y ago
  But it’s Blizzcon
colllectorof 7y ago
How do you respond? A bit too late for that. Traditionally, reasonable companies preempted this kind of stuff by creating a clear separation between professional and personal matters, and not mixing the two. But hey, these days many people want companies to stick their nose into everyone's business, police "bad speech", create comfortable "spaces", enforce conduct and so on. Well, you reap what you sow. Any mechanism that is created to do all this "activism" will inevitably be subverted by something like CPC to enforce their interests upon everyone else.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Perhaps not cleanly stated, but true. Blizzard quite explicitly catered to the LGBTQ+ demographic recently via an Overwatch promotion, a move that can easily be construed as political speech (and which was voluntarily censored by Blizzard in Russia and China). They stuck their feet into this arena, and are now realizing that making political statement can affect their revenue in both directions.
  - dpratt 7y ago
    The fact that they voluntarily censored it in Russia and China is essentially definitive proof that they don’t actually care about the issue, but rather think it will gain them more money in the US. If they cared, they would have required that China and Russia be the bad guy and force them, but they’d clearly prefer to take the path of least resistance.
    - Kaveren 7y ago
      They can care about the issue and still be greedy and care about money way more. The issue with letting governments "force" things like that is that they might just ban the game entirely and forever.
    - JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
      I think it's probably a bit more nuanced than that... Much like how tons of companies seem to jump on the LGBT logo type stuff, I suspect this kind of pro-LGBT sentiment is driven by people within the company who genuinely mean it and then it's up to the company to: (a) embrace their suggestions in the name of boosting employee morale and involvement (b) say no to sidestep potential political implications and potentially unsettle workplace morale The company fundamentally does not give a flying f*ck about the issue at hand, but it manages to work its way up along a chain of individuals who either do believe in the motives or are unwilling to be the one to say no until it actually gets put out officially. If there ever was a "there's big money in this stuff" thought, I seriously doubt it was a significant motivator as the person thinking that cynically would doubtless be aware of international considerations too. I'm not trying to defend companies here at all, to be clear. I struggle to believe any company that isn't taking extremely proactive steps at the risk of their bottom line don't actually care about anything on an ethical level.
taurath 7y ago
> This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created, no real way they will win. I don't think they created it per-say. I think they, and probably most of the executives in the industry, missed just how much a powder-keg chinese censorship is, and how political doing live international (or even national) sporting events can get. Everyone in the west is pissed at blizzard for cowing to China. China is obviously in the wrong here, because they're the ones threatening to kick Blizzard out of China unless Blizzard does what they say. This is a risk that no matter how Blizzard execs managed it, if China pushes that lever all of their profits turn to zero. I think now any company should start to think twice about the risks of operating in China. I think ultimately this will fizzle out, unless the players don't stop protesting, at which point they'll have to stop broadcasting to China, and probably stop operating there.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  I wonder if the initial decision was made by Chinese Executives and Event staff without consulting corporate HQ, then corporate backed them since they have no obvious strategy for backpedaling.
  - taurath 7y ago
    Extremely unlikely, especially given the response afterwards. Blizzard runs things, despite the corporate setup as it is force to be in China.
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    But you just described the obvious strategy: say that corp should be involved in punishments that transcend a particular event (I'm sure they were already) and that corp has decided on punishment X instead.
- willhslade 7y ago
  Per se.
  - taurath 7y ago
Copyrighted 7y ago
They'll either avoid talking about China or attempt to "address" attendees concerns. If they do "address" attendees concerns it'll be something superficial to try and tide people over while they ride out their spate of bad PR. Like they're doing right now with Blitzchung and reducing his ban to six months which is still outrageous.
- LanceH 7y ago
  They would have to announce Diablo 5 to distract anyone.
derefr 7y ago
> no real way they will win They could win everywhere but China, by explicitly choosing to withdraw their products from China.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  And the subgroup of politically charged western customers will due to this spend more than the entire Chinese market in the long term. I'm pretty sure Blizzard calculated this.
- mcguire 7y ago
  And kill their profit margin.
- darklajid 7y ago
  > They could win everywhere but China, by explicitly choosing to withdraw their products from China. Westerner here. No, I don't want ANY political agenda in game streams. If Blizzard hosts people shouting "Free HK", "Liberate Tibet", "Support Palestine" then I'm going to tune out and don't buy their shit. If the next Dota2 stream I'm watching randomly is interrupted by one team reenacting a school shooting to then shout "restrict gun laws, down with the NRA" then I'll close the window and buy less Blizzard stuff. This just Does Not Belong There. YMMV, but I really, really don't want to see this kind of content in gaming streams and would be turned OFF by it. China is unrelated at this point.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    But in the West it is expected that token political statements are to be allowed and protected. "Free HK" isn't a particularly complex political statement, and it is over a topic which Westerners think is unfairly suppressed. A similar comparison would be if Saudi Arabia had Blizzard ban someone for saying "Don't execute rape victims."
    - darklajid 7y ago
      > But in the West it is expected that token political statements are to be allowed and protected. Is that so? I could imagine a huuuge amount of political statements that are illegal in my home country, Germany. Since I was raised there these rules are ingrained in me: "Free Speech" is not a thing (if we compare it to the US) and - that's the important part - I don't DISAGREE with that. > "Free HK" isn't a particularly complex political statement Is it not? I truly, honestly, don't know how complex that is in the end, compared to - say - supporting Texas leving the US, Bavaria leaving Germany, Basque leaving Spain (note I'm not comparing these countries with China at all, I'm just wondering if a separation argument can be simple) > and it is over a topic which Westerners think is unfairly suppressed. I wasn't aware of that > A similar comparison would be if Saudi Arabia had Blizzard ban someone for saying "Don't execute rape victims." No.
euske 7y ago
I'd say that video games will be the next social media (if they aren't already). When they created Twitters and Facebooks, they've never imagined that one day their platform will be a highly politicized. Similarly, people haven't imagined that video games are used for politics, but in the end every platform is going to be political. I wouldn't say it's something they have "created" (as others pointed out already), but rather they've only noticed its nature now.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  And that is totally stupid, why does every platform has to be political? Or rather, being forced by a subset of people with political agenda? Currently r/AskReddit is still relatively free, HN is also mostly free.
  - justanothersys 7y ago
    Every communications platform provides a means of exchange and every exchange is mediated by politics big and small.
  - kbaker 7y ago
    It's a lot easier to deal with the existence of political speech when the Great Firewall blocks you altogether. Both Reddit and HN are blocked in China.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    >And that is totally stupid, why does every platform has to be political? Or rather, being forced by a subset of people with political agenda? Being able to be apolitical is a luxury and a privilege. Some people are not afforded this, and have to be political to attempt to protect their way of life. That there is nothing in your life that forces you to try and affect a change means that you are lucky. The same cries of "Subject X shouldn't be political!" have been around since the days of slavery, civil rights, and suffrage. I expect they go back even further. Transgender people are murdered at appalling rates today - should a transgender person not talk about the fact that they are in significantly more danger than a non-trans individual purely so that someone else doesn't have to read or hear about it? When you're dealing with real human beings, that entails a lot of baggage. Asking for all of that to be dropped at the door for your benefit is unreasonable.
major505 7y ago
I love that in reddit people are just taking all blizzard characters and using them in Hong Kong protests memes. If they blocked Winnie the poo, imagine what they gonna do with Blizzard chars. Soon they will have no more original characters to release on China.
manicdee 7y ago
It’s only a “no win” if you consider losing business with an autocratic nation responsible for mass violation of human rights to be “losing”.
- modriano 7y ago
  In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market. The rules that govern the economy aren't optimized to create equity or equality. They're optimized to push companies to maximize profit and minimize scarcity. Without proper regulation, the companies that optimize for profit will scale much faster than the companies that optimize for ethics or equality. Consumer pressure is somewhat effective in the short term, but it never lasts.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    >In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market. This simply isn't true and I wish people would stop repeating it. https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_law_institute/corporations-and-society/Common-Misunderstandings-About-Corporations.cfm https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_... > "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."
    - modriano 7y ago
      I put quotes around the phrase ("have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable") because even though it's not technically true, it has become a self-reinforcing platitude. Investors enforce that "rule", regardless of the actual law. If Blizzard-Activision said "we are willing to forgo the massive Chinese market and also we want Tencent to immediately divest from their 5% ownership stake", institutional investors would run, and the owners of capital would squeeze hard (as we have seen with Blizzard-Activision, which, to date, hasn't backed down). That's the system we have.
JKCalhoun 7y ago
It seems obvious to me: C, Blizzard does nothing.
- Splines 7y ago
  Is Blizzcon streamed in China? I agree - nothing will happen. They'll likely heavily filter what they broadcast in China if they do stream there, and that's about all they can possibly do.
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    Blizzcon contains live finals for the Overwatch World Cup, StarCraft 2 WCS finals, etc, and they will likely be streamed from the venue and watched by somewhere around (?) 100k people in China, I'm not sure of an exact estimate.
beezischillin 7y ago
I suspect what they're trying to do is to carve out some sort of minimal response that doesn't anger anyone too much and hope that people forget about the whole thing soon. That's generally what always happened. I don't think I've seen a boycott that lasted long enough to hurt any of these companies too much. Maybe this one's different? I don't know. I do know that there are movements that are now consciously trying to drag them into the middle of the political issue to actively get them banned. They were at the wrong place in the wrong time, managing to fan some pretty bad flames and accidentally became a symbol people on the non-extreme ends of both political isles can agree with: the disingenuous corporation putting money above your freedom / others' human rights. All I suspect is, with each atrocity during the protests, Blizzard's name is going to come up in peoples' minds, even more so than other brands that messed up. It'll be interesting to follow this.
xyst 7y ago
The only way for Blizzard to get back any PR is to clean house or offer a “blood sacrifice.” Fire all ELT and upper management that approved the heinous decision to ban this Hearthstone player.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created How do you figure they created it?

CocaKoala 7y ago
If they had just not done anything when blitzchung made his statement in support of Hong Kong, it likely would have gotten essentially zero media play.
- belltaco 7y ago
  Wrong, it would have got huge media play in China as Blizzard not enforcing its rules in opposition to China. Just like the NBA issue.
  - Lazare 7y ago
    Highly debatable. It's by no means clear the rules should have been applied to this case; they were very vague "we can ban anyone for anything that makes us look bad", but what has made Blizzard look bad here has primarily been the enforcement of the rules. If they had just played it off as the players speech, and nothing to do with them at all, it is by no means clear any significant blowback would have stuck to Blizzard. The NBA issue is very different because the original tweet was from the general manager of a team with close Chinese ties. It's like if a Blizzard exec had expressed pro-human rights sentiments in an interview. Obviously we'll never know now, but Blizzard did so much to increase the perceived importance of the event beyond where it would naturally have been (eg, their statement on an official account saying they would always "resolutely safeguard [China's] national dignity"). Once you've framed it in those terns, it's hard to back down. Were there really no alternatives though?
  - kmonsen 7y ago
    Only if China decided to do so. They can pick a fight about anything they want to, so there is really no avoiding that.
    - khuey 7y ago
      For further evidence of that, look at what happened to Lotte, a Korean conglomerate that was essentially banned from China for the crime of having previously owned land that the Korean government used for a military purpose that China did not like.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I haven't followed the situation closely, but we never get to A/B test such decisions. We make a decision and see the outcome for which one we chose. Saying they created this situation is a little like blaming a casualty of war for living in the country they were born in. China exists and it's a large country with growing power that has fundamental cultural differences with the West and always has. There may be better and worse ways to respond, but we have to recognize that everyone is, to some extent, just a bit player on a world stage where many other forces are in play. Not everything that happens in our lives is a thing we directly caused. It's common to take it for granted when the existing world stage benefits us and wonder where we went wrong when it shafts us. Both views are only partial explanations at best.
  - wbl 7y ago
    This isn't a fundamental cultural difference. This is a tyranny that brokes no dissent and murders its people to stay in power.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      I took History of The Far East in college decades ago. The cultural friction between China and the West substantially precedes the current government of the country. Regardless of what is going on there politically currently, they are a growing economic power. That makes them the proverbial 800 pound gorilla that people are increasingly afraid of pissing off for fear of financial consequences. They have one seventh of the world's population. It's a huge market that simply cannot be ignored.
      - cthalupa 7y ago
        >It's a huge market that simply cannot be ignored. True, if your motive is profit above all else. Otherwise, it is quite simple to ignore China's demands. Create the products, services, etc. that you want to create. If people in China buy them, fine. If China says they'll buy them if only you do Thing X, if you do not morally agree with Thing X, simply do not do it. There are near limitless numbers of businesses that are economically viable without catering to China's demands.
- detaro 7y ago
  Or just not went as overboard with it. Doing something might have been a good idea to still send a message (both to China and to players to please not repeat it), the tricky bit is not looking unreasonable while doing so. (e.g. certainly not rescind the price money)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  But Blizzard would likely have lost access to the Chinese market.
ncallaway 7y ago
They banned a player and stripped their prize-money for speaking out in favor of HK. They did this in order to try and maintain access to Chinese markets, probably assuming that the US market wouldn't care.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  They banned him because he spoken about politics which have nothing with video games. I don't think that they tried to censor exactly HK speech. I guess they would have banned him if he would talk about Putin as well.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    I believe that you believe that, but I'm here to tell you that your counterfactual is not realistic.
    - belltaco 7y ago
      The same pro player had expressed his HK independence support on his social media in the past, yet was allowed to play.
  - Lazare 7y ago
    You reckon they'd have banned him if he'd worn a Elizabeth Warren campaign badge? Really? Like...that's a thing you honestly can imagine?
    - belltaco 7y ago
      Yes, because if unpunished, in the next game that will cause another player to wear a MAGA hat. And another to wear a shirt saying "ICE is just doing it's job". They cannot punish those guys because it will make them look biased. And it's all downhill from there.
      - tareqak 7y ago
throwaway2048 7y ago
They chose to be involved with China, who has been infamous for demands like this.
Latty 7y ago
All these companies should refuse to self-censor for China. China does want western media and products. The fact that companies capitulate makes that the standard practice, and means China feels safe demanding it (or doesn't even need to because of the chilling effect). They can make a spectacle of any one company that refuses. I'm not saying that China wouldn't just ban them all, but it would at least mean there is a cost to China in doing it. Yeah, that's putting profit at risk, 100%. That's precisely why it's so important that western audiences tell these companies that they'll loose western business if they capitulate—it has to be made the economic least-bad option to stand up to China for it to be common. They created the situation by capitulating. Yeah, it turns out morals are at odds with profits. Who'd have guessed.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > China does want western media and products. Does it? It seems like China replicates products that are inconvenient to get otherwise.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Quite a few Hollywood movies have made billions in China. This year alone, 3 US movies are in the top 10 grossing movies there, and they made about 7B
    - sushid 7y ago
      And those are very heavily self-censored.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  You can't totally blame Blizzard. It's a Nash equilibrium, right?
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  China has shown they will steal the source code and create a ‘home grown’...
- 7y ago

fouc 7y ago

Blizzard could remove all Blizzard signs and advertising. Make the conference look unofficial.

krustyburger 7y ago
I can’t tell if you’re serious.
avischiffmann 7y ago
But it’s Blizzcon

colllectorof 7y ago

How do you respond? A bit too late for that. Traditionally, reasonable companies preempted this kind of stuff by creating a clear separation between professional and personal matters, and not mixing the two. But hey, these days many people want companies to stick their nose into everyone's business, police "bad speech", create comfortable "spaces", enforce conduct and so on. Well, you reap what you sow. Any mechanism that is created to do all this "activism" will inevitably be subverted by something like CPC to enforce their interests upon everyone else.

falcolas 7y ago
Perhaps not cleanly stated, but true. Blizzard quite explicitly catered to the LGBTQ+ demographic recently via an Overwatch promotion, a move that can easily be construed as political speech (and which was voluntarily censored by Blizzard in Russia and China). They stuck their feet into this arena, and are now realizing that making political statement can affect their revenue in both directions.
- dpratt 7y ago
  The fact that they voluntarily censored it in Russia and China is essentially definitive proof that they don’t actually care about the issue, but rather think it will gain them more money in the US. If they cared, they would have required that China and Russia be the bad guy and force them, but they’d clearly prefer to take the path of least resistance.
  - Kaveren 7y ago
    They can care about the issue and still be greedy and care about money way more. The issue with letting governments "force" things like that is that they might just ban the game entirely and forever.
  - JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
    I think it's probably a bit more nuanced than that... Much like how tons of companies seem to jump on the LGBT logo type stuff, I suspect this kind of pro-LGBT sentiment is driven by people within the company who genuinely mean it and then it's up to the company to: (a) embrace their suggestions in the name of boosting employee morale and involvement (b) say no to sidestep potential political implications and potentially unsettle workplace morale The company fundamentally does not give a flying f*ck about the issue at hand, but it manages to work its way up along a chain of individuals who either do believe in the motives or are unwilling to be the one to say no until it actually gets put out officially. If there ever was a "there's big money in this stuff" thought, I seriously doubt it was a significant motivator as the person thinking that cynically would doubtless be aware of international considerations too. I'm not trying to defend companies here at all, to be clear. I struggle to believe any company that isn't taking extremely proactive steps at the risk of their bottom line don't actually care about anything on an ethical level.

taurath 7y ago

> This is a very awkward situation for blizzard, one they have ultimately created, no real way they will win. I don't think they created it per-say. I think they, and probably most of the executives in the industry, missed just how much a powder-keg chinese censorship is, and how political doing live international (or even national) sporting events can get. Everyone in the west is pissed at blizzard for cowing to China. China is obviously in the wrong here, because they're the ones threatening to kick Blizzard out of China unless Blizzard does what they say. This is a risk that no matter how Blizzard execs managed it, if China pushes that lever all of their profits turn to zero. I think now any company should start to think twice about the risks of operating in China. I think ultimately this will fizzle out, unless the players don't stop protesting, at which point they'll have to stop broadcasting to China, and probably stop operating there.

ben_jones 7y ago
I wonder if the initial decision was made by Chinese Executives and Event staff without consulting corporate HQ, then corporate backed them since they have no obvious strategy for backpedaling.
- taurath 7y ago
  Extremely unlikely, especially given the response afterwards. Blizzard runs things, despite the corporate setup as it is force to be in China.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  But you just described the obvious strategy: say that corp should be involved in punishments that transcend a particular event (I'm sure they were already) and that corp has decided on punishment X instead.
willhslade 7y ago
Per se.
- taurath 7y ago

Copyrighted 7y ago

They'll either avoid talking about China or attempt to "address" attendees concerns. If they do "address" attendees concerns it'll be something superficial to try and tide people over while they ride out their spate of bad PR. Like they're doing right now with Blitzchung and reducing his ban to six months which is still outrageous.

LanceH 7y ago
They would have to announce Diablo 5 to distract anyone.

derefr 7y ago

> no real way they will win They could win everywhere but China, by explicitly choosing to withdraw their products from China.

Aperocky 7y ago
And the subgroup of politically charged western customers will due to this spend more than the entire Chinese market in the long term. I'm pretty sure Blizzard calculated this.
mcguire 7y ago
And kill their profit margin.
darklajid 7y ago
> They could win everywhere but China, by explicitly choosing to withdraw their products from China. Westerner here. No, I don't want ANY political agenda in game streams. If Blizzard hosts people shouting "Free HK", "Liberate Tibet", "Support Palestine" then I'm going to tune out and don't buy their shit. If the next Dota2 stream I'm watching randomly is interrupted by one team reenacting a school shooting to then shout "restrict gun laws, down with the NRA" then I'll close the window and buy less Blizzard stuff. This just Does Not Belong There. YMMV, but I really, really don't want to see this kind of content in gaming streams and would be turned OFF by it. China is unrelated at this point.
- ryacko 7y ago
  But in the West it is expected that token political statements are to be allowed and protected. "Free HK" isn't a particularly complex political statement, and it is over a topic which Westerners think is unfairly suppressed. A similar comparison would be if Saudi Arabia had Blizzard ban someone for saying "Don't execute rape victims."
  - darklajid 7y ago
    > But in the West it is expected that token political statements are to be allowed and protected. Is that so? I could imagine a huuuge amount of political statements that are illegal in my home country, Germany. Since I was raised there these rules are ingrained in me: "Free Speech" is not a thing (if we compare it to the US) and - that's the important part - I don't DISAGREE with that. > "Free HK" isn't a particularly complex political statement Is it not? I truly, honestly, don't know how complex that is in the end, compared to - say - supporting Texas leving the US, Bavaria leaving Germany, Basque leaving Spain (note I'm not comparing these countries with China at all, I'm just wondering if a separation argument can be simple) > and it is over a topic which Westerners think is unfairly suppressed. I wasn't aware of that > A similar comparison would be if Saudi Arabia had Blizzard ban someone for saying "Don't execute rape victims." No.

euske 7y ago

I'd say that video games will be the next social media (if they aren't already). When they created Twitters and Facebooks, they've never imagined that one day their platform will be a highly politicized. Similarly, people haven't imagined that video games are used for politics, but in the end every platform is going to be political. I wouldn't say it's something they have "created" (as others pointed out already), but rather they've only noticed its nature now.

Aperocky 7y ago
And that is totally stupid, why does every platform has to be political? Or rather, being forced by a subset of people with political agenda? Currently r/AskReddit is still relatively free, HN is also mostly free.
- justanothersys 7y ago
  Every communications platform provides a means of exchange and every exchange is mediated by politics big and small.
- kbaker 7y ago
  It's a lot easier to deal with the existence of political speech when the Great Firewall blocks you altogether. Both Reddit and HN are blocked in China.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  >And that is totally stupid, why does every platform has to be political? Or rather, being forced by a subset of people with political agenda? Being able to be apolitical is a luxury and a privilege. Some people are not afforded this, and have to be political to attempt to protect their way of life. That there is nothing in your life that forces you to try and affect a change means that you are lucky. The same cries of "Subject X shouldn't be political!" have been around since the days of slavery, civil rights, and suffrage. I expect they go back even further. Transgender people are murdered at appalling rates today - should a transgender person not talk about the fact that they are in significantly more danger than a non-trans individual purely so that someone else doesn't have to read or hear about it? When you're dealing with real human beings, that entails a lot of baggage. Asking for all of that to be dropped at the door for your benefit is unreasonable.

major505 7y ago

I love that in reddit people are just taking all blizzard characters and using them in Hong Kong protests memes. If they blocked Winnie the poo, imagine what they gonna do with Blizzard chars. Soon they will have no more original characters to release on China.

manicdee 7y ago

It’s only a “no win” if you consider losing business with an autocratic nation responsible for mass violation of human rights to be “losing”.

modriano 7y ago
In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market. The rules that govern the economy aren't optimized to create equity or equality. They're optimized to push companies to maximize profit and minimize scarcity. Without proper regulation, the companies that optimize for profit will scale much faster than the companies that optimize for ethics or equality. Consumer pressure is somewhat effective in the short term, but it never lasts.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  >In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market. This simply isn't true and I wish people would stop repeating it. https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_law_institute/corporations-and-society/Common-Misunderstandings-About-Corporations.cfm https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_... > "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."
  - modriano 7y ago
    I put quotes around the phrase ("have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable") because even though it's not technically true, it has become a self-reinforcing platitude. Investors enforce that "rule", regardless of the actual law. If Blizzard-Activision said "we are willing to forgo the massive Chinese market and also we want Tencent to immediately divest from their 5% ownership stake", institutional investors would run, and the owners of capital would squeeze hard (as we have seen with Blizzard-Activision, which, to date, hasn't backed down). That's the system we have.

JKCalhoun 7y ago

It seems obvious to me: C, Blizzard does nothing.

Splines 7y ago
Is Blizzcon streamed in China? I agree - nothing will happen. They'll likely heavily filter what they broadcast in China if they do stream there, and that's about all they can possibly do.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  Blizzcon contains live finals for the Overwatch World Cup, StarCraft 2 WCS finals, etc, and they will likely be streamed from the venue and watched by somewhere around (?) 100k people in China, I'm not sure of an exact estimate.

beezischillin 7y ago

I suspect what they're trying to do is to carve out some sort of minimal response that doesn't anger anyone too much and hope that people forget about the whole thing soon. That's generally what always happened. I don't think I've seen a boycott that lasted long enough to hurt any of these companies too much. Maybe this one's different? I don't know. I do know that there are movements that are now consciously trying to drag them into the middle of the political issue to actively get them banned. They were at the wrong place in the wrong time, managing to fan some pretty bad flames and accidentally became a symbol people on the non-extreme ends of both political isles can agree with: the disingenuous corporation putting money above your freedom / others' human rights. All I suspect is, with each atrocity during the protests, Blizzard's name is going to come up in peoples' minds, even more so than other brands that messed up. It'll be interesting to follow this.

xyst 7y ago

The only way for Blizzard to get back any PR is to clean house or offer a “blood sacrifice.” Fire all ELT and upper management that approved the heinous decision to ban this Hearthstone player.