The chat feature of Genshin Impact seems to be redacting a myriad of words, along with concerning places such as Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
These details surfaced online when independent journalist Kazuma Hashimoto posted a video to his Twitter account. The video shows chat messages replacing the terms “Hong Kong” and “Taiwan” with censored characters.
The official subreddit for Genshin Impact has also received several complaints about the game’s censorship. One post entitled, “there’s a bug in the game” claimed that a bug was causing “Tibet” to be censored, while others pointed out that even inoffensive words like “enemies” and “words” are also being replaced with censored characters.
Considering Genshin Impact developer miHoYo is based in China, it is widely seen as part of the country’s government’s efforts to restrict discussion about topics it deems politically damaging. Game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad shared a report revealing that Chinese regulatory practices restrict anything that “threatens China’s national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity.”
People have asked me why this is:
1. MiHoYo is a Mainland China based developer
2. China’s laws and games regulator state that games cannot contain “Anything that threatens China’s national unity”
3. All Chinese games censor phrases such as Taiwan / Hong Kong due to this https://t.co/QZ6PerqiTC
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) October 6, 2020
China’s influence has led to projects including a Taiwanese horror game dubbed Devotion that featured assets mocking Chinese president Xi Jinping, be removed from online storefronts. Aside from that, its reach was presumably the reason behind the changes made to a recent re-release of Neo Geo classic Baseball Stars 2, which removed references to Taiwan and its capital city Taipei as locations of a baseball team.
You can watch the censorship in Genshin Impact in the video below. Stay tuned in to AuczarPlus for the latest gaming news and updates!
