
Hong Kong students take protest to virtual world - lawrenceyan
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-games/hong-kong-students-take-protest-to-virtual-world-idUSKBN1X715V
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adelHBN
Comment and Question :

1st the comment: This is absolutely frightening to me: "A role-playing mobile
app game depicting the protest was suspended by Google earlier this month,
while gaming giant Blizzard Entertainment suspended Hong Kong esports star
Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai after he called for the liberation of Hong Kong in a
post-game interview." I am not pro or anti-China. That's not the point. What I
fear is the growing reluctance of companies to do anything that may muddy
their relationship with China, which amounts to effective and in-direct
censorship. Did I get this right, or are there other reasons for Google's and
Blizzard Entertainment's actions? Yes, yes, I know. No politics in business.
But people that conduct business, in this case the video gamers, are in fact
people! At one point can a celebrity, or even a regular employee, voice their
political opinion without fear of reprisal. In the case of China (NBA this
month), it seems it's almost never. Again, my comments are not about China.
It's about how businesses stifle freedom of expression. This article could
have been about Chile or Lebanon, two other countries with massive protests.

Now my question: "The students said they have submitted their game to an
online video game distributor and hope to have it available to the public next
month." Are there any platforms that empower these students to distribute
their video game without relying on other businesses, specially big business?

~~~
salawat
With regards to your comment, you're absolutely spot on in terms of the
chilling effects resulting from not wanting to anger China. That pressure will
not change until the population is willing to put its money where its mouth is
and stop supporting/investing in companies that cave to Chinese threats (or
any other market as you mentioned).

With regards to your question...

>Are there any platforms that empower these students to distribute their video
game without relying on other businesses, specially big business?

Yes and no.

Mobile devices in particular are problematic in that they're much further away
from General Purpose Computers than desktops or the OS's of the days of yore.

If you wanted to get a game out, you just published the executable somewhere
for downloading and marketed it well if you were out to disseminate something
without profit motive.

Nowadays though, the gaming industry flourishes based on integration through
various corporate entities which represent leverage points for sufficiently
large and centralizable market actors.

Android and especially iOS are the most telling examples, but basically any
AppStore like infrastructure that relies on market penetration to maintain
it's own existence is at some point threatened.

This is where the idea of "too big to fail" comes back to bite you. When you
have highly consolidated and invested in industries that are so large that
they constitute large chunks of market share, yet require substantially large
capital inputs necessitating the partaking of "tainted cash" you get an
environment where economic hostage taking becomes a viable strategy.

Your choice suddenly becomes whether to topple/hobble those companies,
potentially having disasterous effects on your labor market, or sacrificing
your cultural morals to the first big market actor who takes offense.

The alternative is "rolling your own dissemination infrastructure." Which
while non-trivial, has it's costs associated with it primarily in the sense of
"what sets of tools are at my disposal to get something out there?"

When you have an actor such as China clamping down on for-profits in order to
prevent them from providing aid, that essentially means starting at the ground
floor. All you can really assume is there for you without the threat of a
lawyer knocking on your door with bad news from a vendor is Free Software, and
whatever smaller actors you can gather who aren't yet big enough to be
adversely effected by your Adversary.

Not an enviable position to be in to be quite honest.

