[legohead]

They could have gotten away with it had they not been so severe. They: Banned the player, fired the casters, and took back the player's winnings. They should have just banned the player for a year and left it at that.

(not agreeing with anything that they did, just looking at it from a PR perspective)

[stereolambda]

I think the details that you mention wouldn't be so important in the media narrative (although maybe they would in the gamers' perception). The ban alone probably speaks to the imagination the most.

I am, for one, moderately optimistic looking at the Western counter-outrage and people ditching Blizzard. We need strong and widely held convictions to defend our basic liberty. Coming from the former Eastern Block, I can easily imagine what is it like to have an unfree government convincing the world that we want to live under its "protection", applying material pressures and pseudo-patriotic propaganda to make it appear so etc. If clumsy Chinese silencing play will trigger more popular defensive reactions, it's good. And in economy, historically totalitarian regimes can be extremely good in catching up (see Stalin's industrialization), not so good in outrunning.

[yifanl]

As a single data point, I've uninstalled all my (2) blizzard games and tried to purge what data I could from my account. I submitted a ticket to delete all my data, but they requested a government photo id... and given that I don't trust Blizzard with my game data, I definitely don't trust them with that.

[not_a_cop75]

Well, given their record, they might just sell your ID photo to the Chinese.

[yifanl]

Which is something I try my best to avoid, yes.

[m-p-3]

Agreed, they went nuclear without anticipating the world to fire back.

[Guph]

they went nuclear not caring about anything but keeping china's totalitarian government happy.

I hope this really hurts blizzard. To many people value playing the game than protecting rights, let alone rights of other people.

[silexia]

We should all completely boycott Blizzard and never purchase games from it again. Same thing with the NBA. In the long run, we need to fight back in China itself against the dictatorship.