Taiwanese developer studio, Red Candle Game, just can't catch a break as their horror game, Devotion, will not appear on GOG even though it was supposed to.
Devotion, a video game developed by a Taiwanese indie studio, was supposed to launch on GOG on Friday, December 18, 2020. This much was announced on the devs' official Twitter account , even linking to the GOG store page for it.
It was not meant to be, however, since the GOG account announced the deal would not go through just five hours later. Their reasoning was that they received "many messages from gamers" and decided to not list the game after all.
The reason for this is obvious and it's the same reason Devotion was delisted from stores before - it contains an Easter Egg of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and Winnie the Pooh.
Frequent internet users already know the connection here but just in case you are out of the loop, a picture of Chinese and USA presidents appeared a few years ago, comparing them to Winnie and Tigger, which resulted in a countrywide ban of the cartoon and its imagery.
Therefore, many storefront doors were closed to Devotion as they didn't want to risk a ban from China themselves by hosting the game on their site. GOG did the same on December 16, 2020, but they put themselves in an uncomfortable position for two reasons.
The first one is that the store went back on their deal, despite having agreed to host the game and the second reason is that they tried to shift the weight of the decisions on gamers instead of admitting they didn't want to lose business in China.
Many saw this as blaming the regular gamers, who were in fact interested to give the game a shot, especially because Detention, the previous game of the same type by the same devs, was liked by the gamers enough to warrant 96 per cent positive reviews on Steam .
As it stands, CD Projekt seem to be hell-bent on ruining the goodwill they cultivated over the better part of the decade, first with Cyberpunk 2077 and now with uncharacteristic move to make it seem like it was the gamers' will to have Devotion removed, as opposed to being their own business decision.
