It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview.
Sometimes I wish I had a character but I heard they are messing up classic by introducing power leveling!
It felt like a big personal sacrifice at the time, but I’m glad to see that it added up into a noteworthy headline here, even if there are other reasons for player decline.
Blizzard is a private company, it's their tournament, their platform. If they don't want that to be instrumentalized as a political platform then they have every right to disallow that.
For another, very recent, example of this: The International Olympic Committee just issued a strict warning against wearing BLM apparels, or any kind of social protests, at the Tokyo Games [0].
Yet the popular mainstream response to that is not "The IOC is bowing down to attempts of censorship by an evil regime!", as it was the case with Blizzard and China, but all around agreement how the Olympics shouldn't be a political platform.
[0] https://thebridge.in/tokyo-2020/wearing-blm-apparels-social-...
then they put their president on stage wearing pride pins, make statements about BLM, and go on at length about how "every voice matters"
... whilst simultaneously banning people for saying "free hong kong", censoring the fact that Tracer/S76 are gay (in countries where this would hurt profitability), amongst other things
That's a broad claim to make. I have seen plenty of prevailing opinions and discussion the other way; commonly referencing Tommie Smith, prior country boycotts and similar events.
In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive demands of foreign countries.
It's not really broad, even here on HN I'm getting downvoted for pointing this out, even tho out of all places we should know better. If you want to see the overwhelmingly non-controversial responses to this you can check out the Reddit discussions about it [0], those are mostly defined by understanding, and not outrage.
> In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive demands of foreign countries.
And there it is again: The narrative that there were demands from the Chinese government to do it, instead of Blizzard just proactively putting the lid on it because it's bad for business.
If we would apply similar assumption to this situation, then that would mean the IOC was apparently pressured by the US government to make that statement, yet that's not something anybody even dares to speak out.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/n5i7iu/black_liv...