Earlier today, GOG.com announced that they were going to start selling Devotion, the Taiwanese psychological horror game that included a derogatory reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Mere hours after making the announcement, GOG walked-back their plans after receiving “many messages from gamers” presumably expressing outrage that GOG would dare to list a game that spoke ill of their great leader.
It wasn’t exactly a great look for GOG, and it’s only getting worse. GOG is already drawing fire from gamers accusing the Polish company of kowtowing to China, and now they’re getting backlash from other indie devs too.
Glass Bottom Games founder Megan Fox just announced that she’s no longer going to list SkateBIRD on GOG following their Devotion debacle. SkateBIRD is the adorable Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-inspired game where you play as a bird on a tiny skateboard doing kickflips and ollies in a tiny skatepark made out of magazines and pencils.
SkateBIRD is set to release sometime in 2021, but will no longer be listed on GOG. Instead, it will have a release on Steam and Steam only.
Fox’s heart is in the right place in trying to help out a fellow indie developer. But it’s a little hard to take her at face value given that Devotion was originally listed on Steam before getting pulled days after its February launch after people found out about the Winnie the Pooh/Xi Jinping reference. Steam did way more damage to Red Candle Games for delisting Devotion and refusing to relist it than GOG ever could.
But SkateBIRD? Still going to be released on Steam in 2021, because Steam is still the biggest marketplace on PC. And because China is the biggest single market for PC gamers, China can get its own censored version of the Steam storefront and even dictate to Steam what games they sell to the rest of the world.
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