I don’t actually think the Wukong thing is real
no PR professional or anyone who knows anything about PR would be stupid enough to put such incendiary language in a document that could so easily get loose
“what if it’s actually real”
please replace the text of this post with “lol, lmao”
looking forward to the “keep politics out of games” people boost this document while trying to argue that being required to not talk about China isn’t political
I feel like the odds of it being real are fully 50/50 just because everyone is fighting so many pointless pro- and anti-china proxy battles at all times in the most arbitrary circumstances these days that there is really no way to even guess
due to my own preferred way of viewing the world, if I had to put money on it, I would bet on comedy of errors / smear campaign that got out of hand, eg, the CIA and CCCP both attempting to plant increasingly hysterical negative stories about the game’s development which both turn out to be summarily ignored by a bitter, incompetent PR person who is putting out even more inflammatory statements than he has been asked to
anyway I preordered the game and I’m looking forward to it
I don’t buy this is some crazy governmental psyop either because
it’s one thing to go “hey please don’t associate our game with language or subjects that would get you demonitized on Youtube” and another to go “well, there was this English language article that pointed out a lot of ugly stuff about us, better just nuke letting creators talk about feminism at all”
the concerns seem to be completely misplaced and not about the game at all other than going overboard on a 6 month old article and the people who care about it are already out and the people who don’t know about it weren’t going to find out from a sponsored video or stream
I will not engage in feminist propaganda. I will not mention covid-19. I WILL fetishize Wu Kong.
I got the info from a credible french game journalist who said he got a key + guidelines. Since he seems to be the only source and I’m not even sure he launched the game he might have just gotten tricked himself. There’s still been no statement from the Wukong team about this so far
Honestly high bar to assume game influencers would be discussing industry policy.
looking forward to all footage being peaceful fly-throughs of the environments due to the no violence rule
hey, peaceful fly-throughs is already the game’s benchmarking app
I guess that means it’s representative of the game
seems like they got mad about a critical IGN article, which reminds me of that unhinged CEO message of the game company that tried to pre-empt a critical piece about that company’s toxic work environment.
+1
okay then
lol, lmao
I’m not even a PR professional and I know that there’s no such thing as “off the record”
if you don’t want shit leaking, you don’t put it into the world
re: covid - any discussion of delays caused or influenced by China’s zero-covid policy would probably be seen as a de facto assault on the CCP
which is weird because if you follow major Chinese devs, then you know mihoyo had to delay a Genshin patch for 3-4 weeks because of the Shanghai lockdown and server ops literally couldn’t get to the servers to perform maintainence
it’s a known X factor
i mean we’ve seen the face of all good PR crumble at the first sign of a critical article several times lately with regards to smaller game companies. a lot of CEOs/people with money are Not Alright in general and probably have unchecked power and and are probably not large or established enough to like… heed the advice of good PR. i wouldn’t be surprised if that note was a result of someone being screamed at by a CEO. and there’s def a sense you can just push around influencers and get them to say whatever.
that’s the rub though
this is effectively PR/marketing being the first wall to crumble instead of having to hastily erect a bulwark after something happened
they skipped the “bad press>CEO talks out of ass>PR tries to cover up>CEO makes it worse>bad press” cycle by just making the bad press themselves
even worse, the people they hired are going to Streisand Effect the IGN article back into circulation
I’m sure if you talked to someone who’s a practiced, sane PR person, they will describe this as a hilarious own goal, like the goalie accidentally kicked the ball backwards and pulled their groin at the same time
I think this is probably not far off from what happened with cyberpunk, where what we’re actually witnessing is people becoming so irrationally annoyed with being asked to perform contrition and moral behavior in the proscribed ways that are expected here, that they just make everything worse
doesn’t necessarily mean that they are or aren’t misogynist (if cyberpunk was anything to go by, the answer is clearly both), it mostly means that corporate culture in what was formerly the Soviet sphere of influence makes people flip their shit when asked to get onside
idk, aren’t we seeing another side effect of the rampant industry-wide thinking along the lines of 'hey, we can do that w/o paying people properly for it" or, even worse, the techbro d00d that asked next best AI bot to do his job for him?
Because the sheer stupidity shining through here makes me seriously wonder if there was any PR person with any experience whatsoever involved, even if they were chinese and completely ignorant of media discourse outside their bubble, this is exactly their job - having a lead on what is acceptable/what isn’t in foreign countries.
I would sooner blame the catholic sphere of influence than the soviet sphere to explain the particular pathologies of cdprojekt
cyberpunk 2077 might be the most catholic game ever made, not even Crusader Kings is as catholic
i’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by sin… SPACE
I wish every exercise game wasn’t just fit boxing.
I miss Ring Fit 
