181–190 of 317 posts
Free Tibet never seemed to be controversial here in the US, makes me wonder why supporting Hong Kong is.
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You can also flip GDPR on its head - should American web sites be subject to European laws?
But they only have to actually follow GDPR for European users, right?
Most articles I've read on it state the user must be in Europe and taking a product/service delivered to Europe. A US tourist buying something in a store when they arrive in Europe has GDPR protection, a French tourist visiting the US (or even at home in France but buying something online to be delivered to a friend in the US) is not.
As much as I want to think change will happen, it's much more likely this will be a few weeks of PR and ultimately nothing will change. For something to change people have to vote with their wallets. In this context that means cancelling subscriptions or dropping games they are already playing in favor for ones by competitors with better integrity, and I don't see that happening. Diablo players could go to Path of Ex…
I would agree with you if this wasn't all tied to ongoing protests in Hong Kong and a continued trade war with China that both don't appear like they're going to be resolved any time soon. Blizzard has inadvertently added an anchor to the situation without a clear way of removing it.
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One thing to note -- it's not really troubling for a country to have a lot of influence. It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West. This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very th…
I’m amazed at just how open (and wrong) cctv’s recent reply to the nba scandal was: “We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC“ This is not just wrong, it’s so…
If you look at free speech in Europe for example, in eg Germany there are laws against hate speech or defamation of individual people (quite differentiated, an opinion is ok and true facts are ok, but invented facts are not). One of the targets is Nazi propaganda, and in general the support is good.
Still, the goal is similar, social stability, peace and protection of minorities. People do not get disappeared, but they do get sued.
As much as I want to think change will happen, it's much more likely this will be a few weeks of PR and ultimately nothing will change. For something to change people have to vote with their wallets. In this context that means cancelling subscriptions or dropping games they are already playing in favor for ones by competitors with better integrity, and I don't see that happening. Diablo players could go to Path of Ex…
FFXIV is a wow alternative that isn't chinese based afaik
If anyone is prompted to try it then be aware that everything under ARR (up to level 50) is a real slog. The slower pace didn't bother me but makes some people quit before the good bits.
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They are legally required to do this. The alternative was completely disabling iCloud in China. This only applies to Chinese users of course.
You say this as though many companies are not already practicing that alternative.
Google famously pulled out of China rather than censor, but that was just a PR move because they already were failing in China. I'd argue that censorship is an altogether different situation anyway.
Apple removing iCloud from China helps literally nobody. Chinese users don't have an alternative that isn't subject to the same Chinese laws. Any user that wishes to resort to less-than-legal alternatives can do so whether or not Apple provides iCloud services.
Ultimately this boils down to "should the Chinese court systems be able to decide when to hand data over to the Chinese government", because that's the effect of using a Chinese partner company to manage the iCloud data. For everyone else it's "should the US court systems be able to decide" instead, which honestly isn't all that much better.
>The demonstration’s numbers fluctuated throughout the day, the two employees said, ranging from a dozen to 30, and the protesters departed sometime in the late afternoon. So less than 1% of the company? Not trying to minimize the issue here but let's also not make events sound bigger than they really are.
Thinking that numbers is all that matters is the same as valuing $$$ over morals, which is what this is all about.
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A common albeit reductive meme around the entire controversy is that Blizzard games were already declining in popularity (especially Starcraft and HotS) so it's easy to boycott them. Path of Exile is an interesting case as I know a lot of Diablo players went there since Diablo III is effectively on life support (including myself), but the resurfacing of the Tencent ownership news is causing ethical complications: htt…
I think the good will that Blizzard earned with their early games has been eroding for a long time. They did, legitimately, used to have enormous community good will. I can think of two ways that's eroded: (1) Blizzard's early games earned huge amounts of goodwill by enabling players to mod them. The map editor of Warcraft and the UI mod-ability of WoW let people build entire communities around modded content (DotA,…
I didn't particularly like the shift to heroes, creeps, and semi-3D in Warcraft 3, but that's a personal opinion.
Then they hit me with Diablo 3 -> Starcraft 2 -> Hearthstone. Diablo 3's faults are well documented, it's apparently in a good place now but that ship has sailed for me. Starcraft 2 just didn't feel good to play for me. The snappy control and clean sprites of SC:BW was replaced with muddy 3D visuals and slow turning 3D models. And Hearthstone was fun, but they dialed up the RNG to entice casual players and make streams exciting. It got annoying to keep rolling the dice - both when opening packs and in the game (Dr Boom anyone?).
It took a while but eventually I realised their spark and magic was gone. They're just another AAA developer that I mostly ignore now.
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Blizzard survives on monthly recurring revenue streams. Boycotting disrupts this stream in a very consistent manner. 1M boycotters mean $10M lost per month plus all the addition revenue from lost streamers and watchers. Blizzard made $1.4B last quarter [0]. It doesn’t bankrupt them but losing 2.5% of earnings sucks. [0] https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
I thought the point was to affect China's policy, not to bankrupt companies we don't like.
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One thing to note -- it's not really troubling for a country to have a lot of influence. It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West. This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very th…
I’m amazed at just how open (and wrong) cctv’s recent reply to the nba scandal was: “We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC“ This is not just wrong, it’s so…
This is very much not true. For one, there's rampant consumer capitalism, very little social net, no tens of millions starving to death, and something like 10-100x more personal income.
I don't know if you have family that grew up under Mao or not that you can go check with, but, this is a really, really false statement to make.
I'm not saying it's all peachy now, just that it is a far cry from Mao.
I do agree that CCP's statement there about freedom of speech is ridiculous to say about something spoken in the US.