![]() But China’s market is large enough-and budgets are small enough-that Chinese censorship often gets incorporated into games at the development stage, not edited out later for distribution. Localization, in other words, requires selecting what speech to put into a game and in what way, creating an easy opportunity for censorship. When games are being made in one free country and published in another, localization is akin to translating a book: Idioms need to be altered, sometimes dialogue reconfigured to make sense for the scene in question. Most games go through a design process known as localization. The lack of attention has given the Chinese government space to impose rigid restrictions on what non-Chinese game makers can do in the Chinese market. Video games have, for the most part, escaped the same level of scrutiny over content censorship that movies have received. Other authoritarian countries hostile to free speech are taking note and pursuing similar investment strategies, most notably Saudi Arabia, which just last month announced a $38 billion investment push into the video game industry. These investments give Tencent the power to enforce Chinese speech values on non-Chinese players at venues outside of mainland China, as in the Blitzchung Affair. video game companies like Riot Games (acquired in 2011), Fortnite maker Epic Games (a 40% stake), and the chat service Discord. Tencent also has large stakes in several other U.S. Activision submitting to Chinese censorship should be no surprise, since Tencent has a 5% stake in the company worth nearly $3 billion. Just last month, Tencent doubled its stake in Ubisoft. A global investment push by the Chinese tech giant Tencent has made it a major player in the video game industry. For the most part, these companies reside in countries that respect values like free speech. Companies like Sega and Nintendo are Japanese, Ubisoft (which makes Assassin’s Creed) is French, Witcher developer CD Projekt Red is Polish, to name a few. Since the 1980s, a game has been as likely to have been made outside the United States as within it. Video games have been globalized for so long that their global reach can sometimes be easy to miss.
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