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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

Which was and still is a completely artificial controversy pushed by certain interest groups.

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-...

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While it is true that Blizzard is a private company and they have the legal right to punish people for political positions, Blizzard's customers have the right to punish Blizzard for their political positions. I cancelled a WoW subscription and didn't buy the Warcraft remaster over it.

> Yet the popular mainstream response to that is

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.

> 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.

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...

they say they don't want their games to be used to take political positions

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

and i am an individual, its my money and i dont just hand it to people with ideas i disagree with.

That's true, but customers always vote with their wallets. It's been happening for decades and will never stop.

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