You can't have it both ways. You're either progressive in marketing and action, or you're a hypocrite and deserve the market's backlash when you show your greed over ethics. It's why Lebron got pummeled so hard for his HK remarks.
Didn't DOTA start as Starcraft mod or something? I don't know what the legal status of mod/spinoffs is. Could I sell my own Mario fanhack game?
AFAIK Skeleking -> Wraith king was a purely -China- ceremonial thing
Yes, the "pressing ceremonial reasons".
No one did. Blizzard's failed lawsuit established precedent. Now we know.
>Could I sell my own Mario fanhack game?
If you are using any assets from the original without permisison, or any copyrighted names/characters, no.
But this particular event may be their reckoning.
Also, did any computing company eventually turn their products into slot machines? Because Konami would be the THEM of the gaming industry: https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/12/20911313/silent-hill-slot...
I find that sort of honesty refreshing when companies like Blizzard, appear to champion social causes in order to gain a mass following to sell games, rather than sell a good solid game without the political fluff piped in.
(I do wish they'd left the old Wii online stores open, but that's another issue.)
(Given the hmmm after)
Depending on your personal politics, any given corporate action is either 'brave, standing up for principles' or 'obviously a sellout to the corrupt bad guys'.
Yes, brilliant catch there, you really got us.
I keep hearing that greed is the ultimate motivation, but if you want to work within China for any reason you must follow the governments ethical guidelines.
For some people within Blizzard, they want to work within China because it is their country or their ancestoral heritage.
Now that I think about it, for most people it seems to simply be an issue of good vs bad.
Maybe I expected too much of them.
Like if they said, in America, "Of course, USA #1, never forget 9/11, freedom baby", that would just be more boilerplate pandering and not really political.
Is the level of hostility that high that even such sweet nothings are treason?
You can think that they're totally, obviously wrong, but that's politics.
The sparse examples I've seen of Chinese people actually being exposed to the reality in HK and being surprised, tells me the state media is being effective in its Ministry of Truth role.
Both were surprised, almost shocked, that the rioting, damage to public and private buildings, and constant street fighting, with deaths on both sides,that they had heard about was completely untrue.
Both seemed to want to temper their comments but still were very surprised that the story they had been told was so different from the things they saw in person.
I don't know what the yellow vest protest is.
Catalonian independence is something I agree with. They've been exploited extremely hard by Spain more or less since they lost their autonomy.
That's exactly what they show.
Whether these groups favored solutions to the fuck-ness are the correct solutions totally tangential to that. When people take to the streets something ain't right.
This, exactly. It takes a lot to get people to resort to civil unrest. I wish it was respected as being that, the last resort of a populace losing faith in it's leadership, and not derided as it is so often as just people who disagree with something. Protests should be a sign of not just disagreement but profound disgust not just for what is being done, but for the processes and the system that permitted it to happen in the first place.
I for one don't weigh issues like this by the number of people who are on side X, I weigh individual people by the positions they take on such issues.
Body of a 15 year old female protestor was found floating naked in the sea. Many speculate she was raped and killed by police.
We do have evidence of torture: HK police (or mainland military acting as such) posing with an individual in a 'tiger chair' and mocking their suffering.
My two points of data involving Chinese residents visiting HK and commenting on the difference between the media stories they had heard, and what they experienced in HK personally, were the basis of my comment.
I am certainly aware that there are about 7 billion different opinions about this topic.
Saying: "I want people to just get along together" doesn't imply that one group should be murdered for that to happen.
As for it being subjective, does that matter? Millions of people are also racist and feel racism -- their racism, anyway -- is A-okay. That doesn't make racism somehow less bad, just because it's technically subjective and some people are fine with it.
HK protestors are for democracy, which is good. The PRC is opposed to democracy, which is bad.
Come on, you should know that the ability to distill complicated issues into slogans is orthogonal to truth.
"Abortion clinic bombers are for life, which is good. Abortion doctors are opposed to life, which is bad."
I don't need to constantly wring my hands about declaring Nazis to be evil asshats, just because they were humans with varying motivations or whatever.
More insightful and deeper analysis may be warranted at times, to be sure, but summarizing them as genocidal, evil maniacs isn't wrong in the least.
I can subjectively say that Nazis are bad.
I can objectively say that Nazi policies had a deleterious effect on Jewish populations.
Similarly, I can objectively say that Beijing's policies have a deleterious effect on human rights as defined by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I can subjectively say that the Chinese government is bad.
I assert that, for many (though possibly not all) moral questions, that there is a fact of the matter as to whether a thing is good or bad or neither.
The wumao '50 sent army' is active on twitter, in both Chinese and English.
I don't accuse said posters of being members of a 50 peso army. I assume that their (nationalistic) opinions are just that.
You should extend these same assumptions to China.
The right of LGBTQ people to exist is not politics, that's human rights. The people who support this are good and right, and the people who oppose it are bad and wrong.
If you don't want to be bad and wrong, don't hold those beliefs. It's very simple, really.
That's not to say that there aren't good and convincing actual arguments, I just don't think this is one of them.
And I don't give a shit what gives grifters like Ben Shapiro "ammunition." He's proven well versed in turning literally anything into ammunition for his bad faith arguments. People like him do not need to be "beaten," they need to be ignored.
Gets a bit more complicated when you strip away the drunk modifier.
They should take a stand. You can't please everyone, so it might as well be those with the right values. And people who think that Muslims should be interred or that HK should cede all political freedom are wrong.
Corporations are chartered to act on behalf of the interests of their shareholders, not, insofar as the two groups are different, their employees.
2) The article specifically references employees, so I also added that angle.
Sure, but literally anything can be “acting with values”, depending on the value system chosen. There's no particular reason that would be determined by the political preferences of employees. It would be more natural for a corporation interested in sacrificing near term returns for some kind of ethics to do so based on the shareholders preferences than employers (or, if the gesture at ethics was intended as a long term business health approach, to do so based on what it was expected potential future customers would respond well to in the corporate story.)
By 'right', you mean of course YOUR right.
You can't please everybody, so you should please ME.
Fascism and the removal of political freedom should not be taken lightly. This should not be controversial.
Comments criticizing corporate or governmental entities should be encouraged.
But if they go against their stated principles, like "oh yeah, let's erase all traces of our pro-LGBT stances we care sooo much about in games for Chinese and Russian markets, because uuuuuuuuh... reasons", you bet people would get upset.
The only issue they saw was displeasing the CCP, it's blatantly obvious.
Part of this fiasco is how blatantly it is implementing a government's crackdown on speech.
Now if a person declares something "blasphemous", everyone will think that the person is on the "bad" side.
Setting a precedence lead to ugly slippery slopes and keeping to the absolutes in the guidelines is generally more inclusive.
The only ethics corporations have are making sure their share holders maximize profit as much as possible, any other ethics they pretend to have exists because they think it will lead to that or they're forced to. Corporations are mandated to do this. If it's a choice between ethics and shareholder profits for a corporation, the latter will always come first because that's why corporations exist. Corporations never have and never will have ethics as long as they exist in their current form where their entire purpose is maximizing profits. I have no idea why people seem to forget this these days.
Even apart from that, it just seems like an overly reductionist perspective. Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line?
Well if it did you'd think corporations would act ethically, whereas reality says otherwise and they don't unless forced by government or public pressure. The world's totally fucked right now because of corporate greed.
Every day I read a new story about how some corporation is acting completely and utterly unethically. It
https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation
>There are two levels of corporate duties to shareholders. First, corporate boards and officers deal at arm’s length with outsiders, and here, their responsibility is governed by the so-called business judgment rule, which protects them against suits by shareholders so long as they follow appropriate procedures in reaching a decision and act in good faith to maximize shareholder value. This rule both constrains corporate insiders but also protects them from liability if their good faith efforts turn out less well financially than expected. Indeed, if officers had to make good on every loss that occurs when deals go sour, no one would take on such roles. And second, whenever corporate officials enter into any kind of self-dealing transaction, the standard of care is much higher, given the conflict of interest. For such transactions, insiders must analyze whether corporate shareholders received “fair value” from the transaction.
Corporations regularly flout environmental protection laws, they regularly flout human rights, they spy on us, they do skirt any and all laws they can, they abuse tax systems, they're responsible for large environmental disasters and end up throwing money at things to make everyone shut up about it, they lobby governments to get laws changed in their favour, they exploit children and impoverished people, they go after drinking water, healthcare and the basic necessities of a modern civilization in search of more profit at the expense.of people. Fuck corporations.