Players around the planet seem quite taken with the world of Genshin Impact. The open world RPG has seen a wide amount of success since it launched last week, with over 21 million players downloading the game and making it the biggest global launch of any Chinese game ever.
Although the game got its start in China, it’s since found a global audience. Some of these players have been dismayed to find that Genshin Impact’s in-game text chat automatically censors the words ‘Taiwan’ and ‘Hong Kong.’
Senior Analyst, Daniel Ahmad, took to Twitter to give an explanation as to why this censor is in Genshin Impact. Ahmad explained that with developer miHoYo being a mainland China based company, it has many laws and regulations it must follow. These regulations include a list of banned words and content that cannot be shared if it is deemed a threat to “China’s national unity.”
Ahmad went on to explain that while these laws apply to Chinese versions of the games, they technically aren’t needed outside of China. He continued by saying this is why Chinese developers will sometimes have a Chinese version of the game as well as a global version with varying content. As an example, he cited PUBG Mobile, which was developed by Chinese company Tencent, as another example of the word ‘Taiwan’ being censored in accordance with the law.
This obviously is not the first instance of Chinese censoring Taiwan recently. At the end of August it was discovered that the classic Neo Geo game Baseball Stars 2 had removed all references to Taiwan and Taipei following a recent port. This change from the ‘Taiwan Dragons’ to simply ‘Dragons’ seems to be directly tied to the growing political tensions between Taiwan and China.
It seems like China-based game developers are determined not to undermine the country’s laws by controlling the content provided in-game, as well as what the players themselves might provide while playing. In 2019, players saw Hearthstone player Blitzchung receive a hefty ban from Blizzard for expressing pro-Hong Kong sentiments in a post-match interview. And although Blizzard later reduced the length of the ban from a year down to 6 months and reinstated his prize money, the company stayed firm that the statements violated the policies Blitzchung had agreed to.
At this time, it seems that this censorship will likely never be removed which is sure to be disappointing to some fans of Genshin Impact. It seems like players will have to wait and see if a global version of the game is created where these regulations are not implemented.
Genshin Impact is available now on PC, PS4, and mobile devices.
