Devotion has massively split the Chinese Steam-users – thus, the dev team has been in trouble.

„For the past one year, we are sorry for making our community worried. Although the current status might not be ideal, we are still here and that nothing has changed – we are and will always develop games with the same passion. It’s a tough year for many of us, but we will keep going, and hopefully, in the future, we could share more works with you all,” Red Candle, the Taiwanese developer team, wrote on Facebook. (Steam isn’t blocked in Taiwan as it is in China.)

To recap: Devotion, their survival horror game, has received a ton of negative reviews on Steam from Chinese players. Why? The game had content mocking Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China. They were referencing to him as Winnie the Pooh, and this meme/comparison has been censored in the Chinese media, as allegedly, the president doesn’t like it. The mainland Chinese Steam users (and, as wrote recently, who knows when the local Chinese version of Steam will launch, as the international version is available in the country via some sort of a loophole) didn’t like it, nor the fact that an easter egg has had a talisman that effectively cursed all the people mainland China, so it got a ton of negative reviews. The developers issued an apology – they claim that they had some placeholder art was left in the final version, and that included the mocking of Xi.

Harvard university enters the fray here: their Yenching library has archived and preserved both Devotion (which is no longer available on Steam) and Detention, which is still available. These games are now part of the library’s East Asian collection. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, is trying to buy the Nintendo PlayStation prototype (as we wrote about it) for the same reason: he wants to preserve all video game consoles so we can experience them in perfect VR in the future.

Preservation is important.

Source: VG247

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