Taiwanese horror game Devotion is back on sale after GOG didn’t release the game

Devotion will be on sale again from Monday. Created by Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games, this horror game was not released on GOG.com last year, probably due to criticism from China over a meme of Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh that was in the game.

Red Candle Games has opened its own digital store, allowing players to purchase the games Devotion and Detention, for example. According to the developer these games can all be purchased without Digital Rights Management, which is also stated in the descriptions of the games. Devotion costs $17 and can be purchased for Windows or Mac.

This horror game should have been released on GOG.com late last year, but CD Projekt, the company behind the game website, ultimately decided not to. The company indicated that this had to do with the opinions of gamers. The company was criticized for this, because this decision would be related to pressure from China, or at least the fear that the platform would otherwise have to stop in China or that it would lose that part of the market.

Devotion was officially released in February 2019. Chinese gamers then gave massive negative reviews, even though the game was rated very well elsewhere. The criticism from China stemmed from a discovered Easter egg in the form of a reference to a meme by Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh. Chinese distributors soon withdrew, Red Candles Games’ Weibo account was closed and the game disappeared from the Chinese version of Steam. Red Candle Games indicated that this was an error and accidentally ended up in the game, but the game quickly disappeared from Steam and never returned.