David Jaffe says openly that his views on the Chinese Communist Party made him reluctant to partner with Tencent, one of the big guns of Chinese expansion…

VGC reported on what the creator of God of War and Twisted Metal had to say on the paywalled Sacred Symbols+, a PlayStation-focused podcast. Jaffe, who, as director of the very first God of War on PS2, was at Kratos’ figurative foundation stone laying, said, “I had a $100 million deal. A Chinese company courted me… and I said, ‘no, thank you’… because you’re Tencent, and I want nothing to do with you.

It was terrible because it was the western Tencent, and it was a western guy that I respect that was calling me, and I wasn’t trying to shame the guy. I hope he’s got thick enough skin, and he’s been an executive in the business way longer than I have, but I was just like, ‘man, I don’t want to do business with a company like that, with a government like that.'”

Later, Moriarty and Jaffe also talked about the increasing amount of money being invested in studios in the games industry, and Jaffe, unrelated to the alleged Twisted Metal reboot (a severe mistake!), explained why he had not accepted the easy money: “Stop killing people. Again, people will be like, ‘America’s hands aren’t clean’, no they are not clean at all, but we’re also not, you know, we all have a system that we could change if we gave a sh_t. In China, you just get picked up off the street if you go online and say something bad about the police or the government or anything and who knows when they’ll see you again. That’s not even mentioning if you’re a f__ing Uyghur.”

Jaffe later shared his dismissive response on Twitter, accused of making the whole thing up. He doesn’t want to leave the YouTube community alone: he streams the games and talks about them with his viewers.

Source: VGC