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Comment and Question : 1st the comment: This is absolutely frightening to me: "A role-playing mobile app game depicting the protest was suspended by Google ea

Comment and Question : 1st the comment: This is absolutely frightening to me: "A role-playing mobile app game depicting the protest was suspended by Google earlier this month, while gaming giant Blizzard Entertainment suspended Hong Kong esports star Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai after he called for the liberation of Hong Kong in a post-game interview." I am not pro or anti-China. That's not the point. What I fear is the growing reluctance of companies to do anything that may muddy their relationship with China, which amounts to effective and in-direct censorship. Did I get this right, or are there other reasons for Google's and Blizzard Entertainment's actions? Yes, yes, I know. No politics in business. But people that conduct business, in this case the video gamers, are in fact people! At one point can a celebrity, or even a regular employee, voice their political opinion without fear of reprisal. In the case of China (NBA this month), it seems it's almost never. Again, my comments are not about China. It's about how businesses stifle freedom of expression. This article could have been about Chile or Lebanon, two other countries with massive protests. Now my question: "The students said they have submitted their game to an online video game distributor and hope to have it available to the public next month." Are there any platforms that empower these students to distribute their video game without relying on other businesses, specially big business?

salawat 7y ago
With regards to your comment, you're absolutely spot on in terms of the chilling effects resulting from not wanting to anger China. That pressure will not change until the population is willing to put its money where its mouth is and stop supporting/investing in companies that cave to Chinese threats (or any other market as you mentioned). With regards to your question... >Are there any platforms that empower these students to distribute their video game without relying on other businesses, specially big business? Yes and no. Mobile devices in particular are problematic in that they're much further away from General Purpose Computers than desktops or the OS's of the days of yore. If you wanted to get a game out, you just published the executable somewhere for downloading and marketed it well if you were out to disseminate something without profit motive. Nowadays though, the gaming industry flourishes based on integration through various corporate entities which represent leverage points for sufficiently large and centralizable market actors. Android and especially iOS are the most telling examples, but basically any AppStore like infrastructure that relies on market penetration to maintain it's own existence is at some point threatened. This is where the idea of "too big to fail" comes back to bite you. When you have highly consolidated and invested in industries that are so large that they constitute large chunks of market share, yet require substantially large capital inputs necessitating the partaking of "tainted cash" you get an environment where economic hostage taking becomes a viable strategy. Your choice suddenly becomes whether to topple/hobble those companies, potentially having disasterous effects on your labor market, or sacrificing your cultural morals to the first big market actor who takes offense. The alternative is "rolling your own dissemination infrastructure." Which while non-trivial, has it's costs associated with it primarily in the sense of "what sets of tools are at my disposal to get something out there?" When you have an actor such as China clamping down on for-profits in order to prevent them from providing aid, that essentially means starting at the ground floor. All you can really assume is there for you without the threat of a lawyer knocking on your door with bad news from a vendor is Free Software, and whatever smaller actors you can gather who aren't yet big enough to be adversely effected by your Adversary. Not an enviable position to be in to be quite honest.

salawat 7y ago

With regards to your comment, you're absolutely spot on in terms of the chilling effects resulting from not wanting to anger China. That pressure will not change until the population is willing to put its money where its mouth is and stop supporting/investing in companies that cave to Chinese threats (or any other market as you mentioned). With regards to your question... >Are there any platforms that empower these students to distribute their video game without relying on other businesses, specially big business? Yes and no. Mobile devices in particular are problematic in that they're much further away from General Purpose Computers than desktops or the OS's of the days of yore. If you wanted to get a game out, you just published the executable somewhere for downloading and marketed it well if you were out to disseminate something without profit motive. Nowadays though, the gaming industry flourishes based on integration through various corporate entities which represent leverage points for sufficiently large and centralizable market actors. Android and especially iOS are the most telling examples, but basically any AppStore like infrastructure that relies on market penetration to maintain it's own existence is at some point threatened. This is where the idea of "too big to fail" comes back to bite you. When you have highly consolidated and invested in industries that are so large that they constitute large chunks of market share, yet require substantially large capital inputs necessitating the partaking of "tainted cash" you get an environment where economic hostage taking becomes a viable strategy. Your choice suddenly becomes whether to topple/hobble those companies, potentially having disasterous effects on your labor market, or sacrificing your cultural morals to the first big market actor who takes offense. The alternative is "rolling your own dissemination infrastructure." Which while non-trivial, has it's costs associated with it primarily in the sense of "what sets of tools are at my disposal to get something out there?" When you have an actor such as China clamping down on for-profits in order to prevent them from providing aid, that essentially means starting at the ground floor. All you can really assume is there for you without the threat of a lawyer knocking on your door with bad news from a vendor is Free Software, and whatever smaller actors you can gather who aren't yet big enough to be adversely effected by your Adversary. Not an enviable position to be in to be quite honest.