Yesterday, Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games announced that Devotion would be coming to GOG.com. The game would have been sold for the low price of $16.99, which frankly would have been a steal for the psychological horror game.
And then it kinda all went to hell.
Once news of Devotion’s rerelease became widespread, GOG started receiving “many messages from gamers” about the controversial title. GOG never said what those messages contained, but it likely was more the volume of those messages rather than the content that spooked them off.
Hours after Red Candle made the initial announcement, GOG corrected them by saying “we have decided not to list the game in our store.”
Why the controversy? Devotion originally contained a derogatory reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping which has been banned in China since 2018. When the game first tried to release on Steam last February, that reference engendered quite a bit of hate from Steam’s Chinese community. So much that Steam eventually delisted Devotion and issued an apology.
Red Candle Games has since offered its own apology, saying that the reference was supposed to be a placeholder and was never intended to be in the final release of the game. It’s since been removed, but Steam refuses to put Devotion back on its storefront.
GOG isn’t nearly as large as Steam in terms of users, but it’s at least some way for Red Candle Games to get Devotion back out there. Unfortunately, the mere mention of the game is enough to get any digital storefront brigaded by Chinese nationalists.
Things may look pretty bleak for Red Candle Games, but the Taiwanese developer isn’t giving up yet.
“For the players looking forward to Devotion's re-release, please accept our most sincere apology,” the developer wrote. “This is a difficult predicament to overcome, but we won't stop striving."
One platform suggested to Red Candle that will almost surely host Devotion is Itch.io. The indie specialist store already hosts Hong Kong protest games and so is unlikely to bow to Chinese pressure.
Source: Red Candle Games