Over the past few weeks there’s has been an heavy conflict of interest that has raged on in the gaming community. Time and time again, gamers have been on the receiving end of attacks from Journalist who have chosen to side with giant corporate companies on varies issues and paint them as nothing more that whining babies. Today, we discuss Ubisoft attempt at censorship.
To catch you up to speed with what’s been going on right now, Ubisoft in a blog, outlined a few changes they’re planning to make for Rainbow Six Siege. These changes were intended to make the game ready for a Chinese launch. Now, the issue that came about is that, Ubisoft wanted a single universal version of the game and decided to censor some aspects of the game to match the policy of the Chinese government. That didn’t sit well with the Rainbow Six community and naturally they spoke out.
A couple of days later, Ubisoft reversed their decision and vowed to never do such things again. Happy days right? Well, not according to some Journalists who feel like Ubisoft was pandering to unreasonable players. A YouTuber you may be familiar with by the name of YongYea made a very detailed video of the whole ordeal to which you can check out below.
I’m here to give my thoughts on the whole mess itself. First off, I agree with the gamers who’ve raised concerns over Ubisoft plans to force censorship towards their fans. Why should the Western market endure polices and censorship that has nothing to do with them? It’s one of those things that can lead to more censorship in the future if we are to ever allow it.
UK Editor James Batchelor of gamesindustry.biz wrote a blog in which he made it sound like gamers don’t want Ubisoft to expand into the Chinese market or didn’t understand the business side of things and the unjust for their complaints, which is not true at all. In fact, his entire blog was very condescending towards gamers in general. If Ubisoft wants to enter the Chinese market while following the Chinese government regulations, unfortunately, they’re are going to have to build a brand new version just for China. Why should we, a western market, be forced to receive a version of a game just to match the Chinese market and their ridiculous censorship laws? And if we allowed Ubisoft to carrying on with the plan, when would it end?
I’m really getting sick and tired of the narrative that some of these Journalist are starting to spread, this notion that gamers should be the only consumers to just bend over and take it as is be grateful for it. It’s borderline asinine. No matter which side you look at, there’s always going to be extremists but to disregard genuine concerns of censorship by gamers is crazy to me.
