Devotion's removal from Steam and GOG Store

Devotion is a 2019 first-person psychological horror game developed by Red Candle Games, a Taiwanese indie studio, for mh:awesomegames:Steam; for the first few days of its availability, it received generally favourable reviews from critics and players, but in the final few days, the game was review-bombed by Chinese viewers due to reasons mentioned below.

Discovery of Meme
About two days after the game's release on Steam, players discovered that the seemingly non-sensible Chinese on a few posters was actually eligible and translated to "Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh"; this was a reference to people comparing Xi Jinping (China's leader) stature to Winnie the Pooh, which Xi Jinping found so offensive he banned the bear from the country. Additionally, some text was found to have translated to "Your mom is a moron".

Review-Bombing and removal from Steam
The game received a rather large review bomb from Chinese gamers with the average going from "Overwhelming Positive" to "Mostly Negative" within a few hours. Many believe this was to prevent the Chinese government from banning Steam, since the CCP is infamous for banning content that they find inappropriate. Following this, Red Candle released a patch stating that the messages were placeholders that accidentally got left in the game, with the offending text being changed to a generic "Happy New Years" text.

Despite this, Chinese players data-mined the game's code and found several other mockings such as the cult being internally referred to as "China", and the leader as the "People's Republic of China".

On February 25, 2020, Red Candle removed Devotion citing technical issues and to remove all Chinese mockings.

GOG Store's removal
Almost a year after Devotion was removed from Steam, on December 16, 2020, Red Candle had announced that Devotion would be re-published on CD Projekt's GOG Store on December 18. However, a few hours after the announcement, GOG Store had announced that Devotion would not be coming to their store, citing in their Twitter statement that ''"After receiving many messages from gamers, we decided not to publish the game in our store."

Following the statement by GOG Store, many gamers has expressed a strong criticism against GOG and CD Projekt for following the pressure from the CCP. As Devotion 's removal from GOG happened just a week after Cyberpunk 2077 's disasterous launch, which generated a strong outrage all over the gaming community, both incident's outrage had culiminated into a much worse backlash against CD Projekt's reputation.

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