TGO Daily | December 17, 2020 | Devotion Listed and De-Listed from GOG
In The News
Devotion Listed and De-Listed
Last year, a horror game called Devotion came out by Taiwanese developers Red Candle Games. A few days after release, it was discovered than an asset in the game was a poster mocking the Chinese president. At the time, saying it was the work of a rogue developer:
“Upon learning of this, we immediately replaced the art material within an hour…The words written on the art material does not stand for Red Candle Games' stance, nor is it in any ways related to Devotion's story and theme.”
The game basically disappeared everywhere. It was review bombed and de-listed on Steam, and not a trace of it could be found on their YouTube channel. They also lost a number of partnerships, and their business license to sell games in China.
Today, Red Candle announced that the game would finally be returning to a digital storefront through GOG.com. Only a few hours after that announcement, GOG tweeted this:
Of course, many people have taken umbrage with this decision:
There have even been some indie developers who have opted to take their games off of GOG because of this decision:
We don’t know what exactly happened between the two announcements, because presumably the game would have been green-lit at some point. Either way, anyone who is trying to get their hands on Devotion is now going to have to wait a bit longer. Platforms like GOG are not willing to get in trouble with the Chinese government, because a lot of money comes from that region which is highly difficult to get access to.
Vin Diesel and Ark 2
Back at The Game Awards, they announced Ark 2, the sequel to the biggest dinosaur game in the world. In the trailer, Vin Diesel appeared out of nowhere as its main focus. Well it turns out, they didn’t just throw money at a famous actor to appear — he’s also producing the game and its companion animated series.
Apparently he’s put thousands of hours into the first Ark, and has earned himself the title of “president of creative convergence” at the studio. As an aside — today I learned that Diesel is a huge gamer and once founded his own development studio which is still in operation. They probably aren’t doing anything you’ve heard of before, but I thought it was interesting.
Video Games and Spotify
Talking to CNN, Spotify shared some interesting data about video game music. Here are some interesting nuggets of info:
Streaming from game consoles are up 55% year over year, with rap and trap music being the most popular genres
Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert increased his number of streams by 207%
The most popular soundtracks were Minecraft, Death Stranding, and the original DOOM
Virtual artists Hatsune Miku and K/DA had significant spikes in listenership
Also In The News
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