> “Doing business in China, it’s been easier to ignore the authoritarianism of the government because they were asking us to do things like remove a skeleton [from a game],” he said.
It looks like China learned nothing from the USSR (or from their own Great Leap Forward, for that matter). Escalation is not going to go their way. Hawkish members of the CCP are going to blow the whole thing up.
This is much bigger than Activision-Blizzard and it's clear that Western companies are going to have to pick a side soon. There's a very salient conflict between Wall Street and the Classical Liberal underpinnings of our modern democracies. As it stands right now, this is going to get worse before it gets better. Is anyone worried about the HKD/USD peg falling?
> This is much bigger than Activision-Blizzard and it's clear that Western companies are going to have to pick a side soon.
I would imagine there are thousands of businesses with varying degrees of exposure to the Chinese market whose executives are on pins and needles right now, desperately hoping no circumstance arises that will require them to publicly take a side on this issue.
Businesses with less exposure or fewer ambitions in China might have a lower barrier to standing firm if pushed, but those with the most to lose in the Chinese market are staring down a very real, very imminent choice between taking a major hit to either their revenues or their ethical credibility.
On the contrary, they learned that USSR's self imposed isolation was fundamentally flawed and largely stagnated the Soviet economy. It also put them behind the Western world in terms of R&D. China is attempting to put those lessons to use and attempting to have an "Western opened" totalitarian regime. So far, it seems to be working. Accepting Western capital and tech, stealing everything they can find, and suppressing anything that's a threat to their system while requesting their system become normalized. Whereas we used to shut out the Soviet Union, we welcome China.
+1 on taking the side, it's hard to see China as anything less than hostile to Western democracy.
I don't think it's Western companies as much as Western society putting pressure on all companies in general - and that'll bump up really hard against neo-liberalism and especially the libretarian segments of society.
Ideally we'll see political support shifting away from neo-liberalism and toward more pro-democracy ideologies.
Theoretically, at least, I think that the two are inextricably linked. I don't think you can have neo-liberalism (an actually free free market) unless your markets live in a democratic law-abiding state.
There's a strong correlation between economic and social liberty, as well as with the average wealth, quality of life, and happiness of the general population.
The fact Taiwan and HK are right next to China with ethnically and culturally similar people and were both way ahead of China economically and socially is no surprise. I often wonder how much more advanced the entire world would be if China didn't waste 50yrs trying their failed experiment and had skyrocketed to success like Japan, South Korea, HK, and Taiwan did long ago.
one of the reasons Japan/Taiwan/SK's economies are so strong is because - you guessed it - China is a major importer of their produced goods.
without disposable income they have gained from something over the last few decades, they aren't importing massive amounts of goods from their neighbors.
Now imagine if China opened up their market earlier and had fair independent courts and political systems where they could attract other country's companies, talent, and money 10x easier without fear of it being stolen or squeezed out. They'd all be doing even better.
The golden goose of neo-liberalism has always been local free-democracy and political protections while offshoring the uglier parts of the free-market economy to regions where the local political system can't resist the pressures being imposed by corporations. Within the west the idea is that corporations (mostly) play nice and respect democracy while exploiting that abroad - I think that may have lasted for a month or so and then folks realized they could double dip and have been eroding political institution for the benefit of corporations both locally and abroad.
true, but I don't think you can have neo-liberalism, and do anything other than move away from a democratic law-abiding state, and towards a more authoritarian most-state-capitalist society
I am not sure where I stand on this issue. I see two sides:
1) China has 1.4 billion potential gamers. That is a TON of money to be had. It's almost 5x the population of the US. If you can make money selling to 330 million, you can probably make more selling to 1.4 billion.
2) China might not want our games. A lot of game tropes that we love in the West are simply not allowed to be depicted in China. A group of renegades bands together to throw off the shackles of oppression? Not allowed. One of the characters is openly gay? Not allowed. The heroes don't wear enough clothing? Not allowed. Even "blood and gore" is apparently objectionable in first-person shooters. So it really calls into questions what story you can tell that is going to be well-received in both the US market and in China. Americans aren't going to buy a watered-down game teeming with Communist propaganda. So you are already developing two separate games.
I worry that we see $$$ in China, but it's not ever going to pan out. If we can all increase our wealth by 5x in a year by censoring a video game, maybe it's worth it. But if we do that and see nothing in return, then we just look like fools. My fear is that the second case is more likely than the first.
> Do you see companies that aren't partially owned by Chinese interests doing things like this?
I think this is kind of cheating (Tencent, Alibaba, etc. have zillions of small-ish investments). I was mostly thinking about Apple, Google, heck, even the NBA.
What is going to be more interesting to me is to see what Riot Games, who is wholly owned by Tencent, does when the inevitable Hong Kong protests come in during this years Worlds. There's even a Hong Kong team in the mix, and there's already reports surfacing that Tencent has directed casters not bring up Hong Kong.
There's money on the table to be sure, but multiple incentives are aligned to make getting games in front of China make sense. Even for developers who aren't profit-motivated primarily, being seen is its own motivation.
It's hard to ignore the country with over a billion people.
It looks like China learned nothing from the USSR (or from their own Great Leap Forward, for that matter). Escalation is not going to go their way. Hawkish members of the CCP are going to blow the whole thing up.
This is much bigger than Activision-Blizzard and it's clear that Western companies are going to have to pick a side soon. There's a very salient conflict between Wall Street and the Classical Liberal underpinnings of our modern democracies. As it stands right now, this is going to get worse before it gets better. Is anyone worried about the HKD/USD peg falling?