Back in February Kotaku UK reported on a game called Devotion disappearing from Steam , following the discovery of a piece of in-game art that mocked Chinese president Xi Jinping. We checked back in May, and the game had not reappeared .
The Chinese Communist Party, world-famous for its sense of humour, has now decided that merely disappearing this game was not enough. Now it has revoked the business license of one of the game's publishers, Indievent.
Without a business license, you cannot legally operate in China. So that's that for Indievent. worldwide. Devotion was developed by the Taiwanese studio Red Candle, but of course the Chinese market is essential for its economic viability.
And of course another point of this extreme censorship is that it sends a message to game publishers worldwide. Now doubt most of them have an eye on the possibility of sales to China.
It seems that Devotion has been totally sunk by the Winnie the Pooh incident. Red Candle Gamessaid in a statement:
For the past four months, the art asset incident related to Devotion has caused immeasurable harm to Red Candle Games and our partner, (Chinese publisher Indievent),
While mediation is still in progress, Red Candle's co-founders have reached a unanimous decision to not re-release 'Devotion' in the near term, including but not limited to obtaining profit from sales, revision, IP authorization, etc. to prevent
unnecessary misconception.
The studio extended its apologies to all impacted teams and personnel, and is taking full responsibility for any and all losses.
Chinese film censorship leaves little chance that its films can find international success and the resulting insipid films are hardly setting China's box office alight
The Hidden Sword is a 2017 China action drama by Haofeng Xu.
Starring Qing Xu, Jue Huang and Aoyue Zhang.
Latest film of Xu Haofeng, a new master of Chinese Wu Xia films, screenwriter of Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster. The new film tells a Chinese Wu Xia story happened in 1930s, but with a new presentation.
Long-awaited martial-arts film The Hidden Sword announced Monday that its theatrical release this Friday in China has been cancelled, presumably the latest casualty of a censorship campaign that is damaging the country's box office.
The Chinese film censors had granted the film at least enough permission to appear at international film festivals and it won awards at Montreal and Taiwan.
However the censors seemed to get cold feet at the domestic premiere. It was banned just 4 days before its premiere.
Mohd Zamberi Abdul Aziz, chairman of the Malaysian Film Censorship Board (LPF) has been interviewed by the New Straits Times.
He reported that eight films had been banned in 2018:
Dua -- Dunia Untuk Aku (Malaysia)
Padmaavat (India)
Iruttu Arayil Murattu Kuthtu (Malaysia)
Love, Simon (US)
A Fantastic Woman (Chile / Germany / Spain / USA)
Bilal (Malaysia)
18.05.2009 (India)
The Happytime Murders (US)
He also made a fe comments as to why these had been banned
Any film with LGBT elements, whether directly or indirectly promoting or propagandising this element, will be banned. That was why Dua -- Dunia Untuk Aku was banned.
The animated film Bilal was banned as its portrayal of Islam was not in accordance with the Sunnah practised in Malaysia.
The Bollywood movie Padmaavat , meanwhile, was axed as it depicted Muslims negatively.
The other movies contained LGBT elements or had extreme sexual scenes.
Zamberi also spoke of the board's discussions to add an extra age certificate to Malaysia's line up. Currently, films are classified as U, P13 or 18. Zamberi said most of the time, local distributors and producers seek a U or P13 classification.
He said that there was a significant gap between the P13 and 18 categories and so the LPF is mulling introducing new classifications, like P15 or P16, to bridge this gap.
VPNs recently came under the scrutiny of the Indonesian government after authorities placed restrictions on social media during the May 21-22 election protests. At that time, the government temporarily banned certain features of social media to
censor the communications that it did not like. Inevitably many Indonesians turned to using VPNs to bypass the ban, causing a sharp increase in VPN downloads.
In response, the government claimed that VPNs, especially the free ones, may pose threats to users' private data and that they should be uninstalled.
Now the Information and Communications Ministry (Kominfo) chipped in saying that Kominfo will not hesitate to block VPNs that aren't licensed in Indonesia. The licensing requirement seems to be a tenuous correlation that VPNs are somehow
equivalent to ISPs, and ISPs Indonesia must be licensed.
This connection is not quite confirmed as yet and Kominfo is set to meet with the Association of Internet Service Providers in Indonesia (APJII) to discuss a possible VPN provider ban.
The Eight Hundred is a 2019 China war film by Hu Guan.
Starring Yi Zhang, Chen Yao and Haoming Yu.
In 1937, eight hundred Chinese soldiers fight under siege from a warehouse in the middle of the Shanghai battlefield, completely surrounded by the Japanese army.
The premiere of Chinese war epic The Eight Hundred has been cancelled after an influential group deemed it inappropriate ahead of Communist China's 70th anniversary. The Chinese Red Culture Research Association held an academic seminar on
filmmaking in which the storyline of The Eight Hundred was criticised because it glorifies the heroic role of Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). The Kuomintang eventually lost the civil war that led to the Communist Party's triumph and
creation of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949.
Hailed as the Chinese Dunkirk, the film details a story of a Chinese army unit fighting against Japanese invaders in the 1937 Battle of Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
After consultation between the production team and other parties, the July 5 premiere was cancelled and will not be released this summer, according to a statement posted on Tuesday on the film's Weibo account, a Twitter like platform. The new
release date will be announced at a later time, the statement said, without explaining the reasons behind the decision.
The movie had already been abruptly yanked from the Shanghai International Film Festival earlier this month due to technical issues -- a term often used as a euphemism for censorship.
The Eight Hundred is the first Chinese film shot entirely on digital IMAX cameras reportedly spent more than $80 million in production costs.
Back in February Kotaku UK reported on a game called Devotion disappearing from Steam , following the discovery of a piece of in-game art that mocked Chinese president Xi Jinping. We checked back in May, and the game had not reappeared .
VPNs recently came under the scrutiny of the Indonesian government after authorities placed restrictions on social media during the May 21-22 election protests. At that time, the government temporarily banned certain features of social media to
censor the communications that it did not like. Inevitably many Indonesians turned to using VPNs to bypass the ban, causing a sharp increase in VPN downloads.
The Eight Hundred is a 2019 China war film by Hu Guan. 
