Welcome to 3 days ago in this thread.
Also discussed here:
Yeah I can’t keep up. Three days is a flash in the pan. Basically light speed.
Curious what @legowarrior and others that support EGS think about it in light of the recent Blizzard (and NBA) developments - it seems to be a pretty clear case that courtship of China investment or consumers does require a serious values compromise by Western firms, especially when it comes to media/content.
For slight context:
Edit: one more
An alternative thread title: Epic Games Store - 40% of profit, 100% of editorial decisions goes to Tencent.
The investments are made and you aren’t bound to do anything else (barring any weird signed contracts that probably don’t exist). Catering to the Chinese market for bigger bank accounts is where the morals go away, and Epic isn’t in any special situation there, as far as we know.
And for crying out loud, stop calling it communism.
I’m assuming here, but capital C communism there probably refers to the proper Communist Party of China. In any case he also referred to authoritarianism, which is more accurate from an English point of view, and the Chinese state self refer this way, so it seems like an odd argument to focus on.
As a socialist, I disagree :P Not the least of which in that it has lead to the belief that any country who calls itself democratic and allows a vote every 4/5 years is a country full of freedom that doesn’t commit the same crimes for the same economic and realpolitik reasons.
Right, the Chinese government and US government are pretty much the same thing.
Tencent has their fingers in so many pies. I don’t think the investment had anything to do with Blizzard’s decision, I think it had to do with Blizzard being so thirsty for the Chinese market. Many companies will do this, regardless if any Chinese money has been invested in their company. Hollywood is already doing this as China’s market becomes more and more lucrative.
That being said, I see what’s going on with ESPN disallowing discussion of the NBA issue and that is due to investor influence. Same with outlets like The Athletic. I’m trying to think of how this might impact Epic. They’re already a curated store, so maybe they don’t carry titles that would offend Chinese investors? That doesn’t sound too bad to me assuming there’s other outlets like Steam that don’t care.
What are your major concerns with the investment, @AK_Icebear? Do you mostly object to where the profits are going to or do you see specific ways that Tencent might flex their muscles in a way that hurts users or developers of the platform?
That’s an exaggerated version I don’t believe, and it’s also far from constrained to some actions by one country. Germany selling weapons to Tunisia at the same time there are strikes on their local factories was about as great, but no one cared because Muslims.
China just doesn’t care about increasing their exploitation because it has no political consequences. If we didn’t make it have consequences here, our (necessary, but not sufficient) elections wouldn’t stop bad things either. As evidenced by the actions of several chiefs of state lately, it is defending rights that stops abuses, not popularity contests.
It just so happens that it’s always for the material gains of a few people, which isn’t exactly the goal of marxism, to say the least.
They don’t? I think a significant portion of Steam’s audience is now Chinese. While Gabe and his partners are (probably) free to do what they want, would they thumb their nose at a Chinese ban?
Well, I said assuming. :) That being said, Steam carries all kinds of games that are banned in China.
My current expectation is that Valve would do exactly that. But I would have said the same kind of thing about google 5 years ago so I might be completely wrong.
The latter mostly. I think it’s unrealistic, even delusional, to think that a major shareholder somehow has no editorial input or veto. Tencent as an investor / client / partner has swung the needle towards censorship in a few examples brought up this week, one above in this thread. Denial of this eventuality was naive before, now it’s just ignorant.
My larger concern is that both individual speech, and expression in an occasionally artistic medium, is being curtailed by pressure from a gargantuan, totalitarian power. It feels as naive to assume the situation under that ownership (or control as a market gatekeeper) will somehow be better than the system that preceded it without that influence. I’m not advocating forcing anyone to boycott EGS on these grounds, but I will say my reason and act on my own.
Sometimes a major shareholder only invests for the sake of profit and doesn’t have any input or veto power, they simply earn a percentage of a profit.
This is true but you have to admit that holding a 40% stake in a company gives your voice a lot of sway.
No, I don’t. It gives them a lot of profit, but not sway.
Then how do you explain ESPN and other sites that are censoring themselves at the behest of their Chinese investors?