GOG announces re-release of Devotion, only to pull a U-turn hours later

Cast your mind back to the seemingly carefree days of 2019, when everything felt bad but wasn’t anywhere close to as terrible as this year turned out to be. Devotion, a little horror game developed by Taiwanese studio Red Candle, was released and subsequently pulled from online stores due to it containing an in-game joke about Chinese president Xi Jinping looking like Winnie the Pooh (a classic, to be sure). It was a pretty bad situation all around but a year later, victory seemed to be at hand as Red Candle announced that it would be re-releasing Devotion on GOG!

Of course, nothing is ever so simple, is it?

Just a few hours after the announcement, GOG made its own announcement that the game will not be launching on the CDPR owned platform. The statement issues by the company reads as, “Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store.” Which is obviously a very poor excuse and should actually read as, “Yeah look, the Chinese government was stoked on this and we didn’t want to make Xi Jinping sad”.

As it turns, people were very annoyed at this decision as GOG’s Twitter page was flooded with people protesting the reversed decision. This is the same company who just released a game themed around Cyberpunk ideals, right? Don’t you love it when you can cut off a thick slice of irony for breakfast? There’s no word on whether Devotion will return and GOG has yet to respond to any questions from the media. I doubt they really want to say much else on the matter.

Last Updated: December 17, 2020