GGG, Tencent, & The CCP Human Camps

One thing we need to get straight: GGG cannot 'leave' Tencent. It's not some amicable, mutually-beneficial business relationship. They are owned by Tencent. And I'm willing to bet even if Chris were to quit and want to do something game-related with his tens of millions, there are likely reams of legal issues regarding non-compete clauses preventing precisely that. Tencent are a giant thug of a corporation and do not suffer rivals gladly, especially from within their own ranks.

GGG cannot leave Tencent. PoE is a Tencent product.

Your other suggestion though? You leaving GGG and PoE? That is far more doable. You technically don't even have to quit the game, since it's free, but let's not pretend that'd be even vaguely enjoyable.

But are you really willing to? Because while it's really easy to do, there's no taking it back. You will have to find other games, and like or not, no other ARPG right now comes close to PoE. It's had ten years to get this good, after all.

Still want to stand by your morals at this late, late hour? To give up what you love, what you've loved daily for years, because it's been undermined at some vague, macro level that doesn't even affect your experience of that game?

If so: contact Support and ask them to delete your account, along with every mtx you ever bought in support of what you thought was 'GGG'. They already have your money, and it's already gone, but at least you won't be 'using' what you purchased anymore. I mean, if your conscience is that plagued by this. I won't pretend that moral outrage was the totality of my reasoning for deleting my own mtxes, but I equally won't pretend that I didn't feel a whole lot better about myself the moment they were gone.

I knew the acquisition of GGG by Tencent was going to end my time with PoE; I just didn't know how or when it'd happen. I'm fairly ashamed that what triggered it was petty and pointless, but not a day goes by that I regret actually doing it. I miss what was, but it will never be again. It cannot be. The original owners of GGG took their payday, as was entirely their right, and sold out. They took you with them; you just didn't realise it. None of us really did, although I should have listened to my roiling guts the day it happened. Like everyone else, I wanted to believe nothing would change. There'd be a domestic PoE tailored for Tencent's customers in China, and ours, the international, would be business as usual. All that changed was that we had a new landlord, a new parent company.

But we knew even then that Tencent was shady as shit. Facial recognition technology and data-sharing. Social engineering via credit scores. Acquisitions of entire movie studios to ensure Western-made blockbusters could be China-friendly. A long history of ignoring IP law to create clones of popular products, and then after getting rich from doing that just buying IPs with the implicit threat that if you didn't sell to them, they'd just create a copy of your work and make a fortune off it in China anyway. Their relationship with pay-to-win isn't so much tentative as hearty and wholly embraced by a player base accustomed to the ancient concept of basic mercantile fluidity: money is power. This was all known the day GGG became a Tencent asset. All of it.

And that's ignoring the larger issues of Tencent being a functioning arm of the Chinese state -- a state that refuses to acknowledge Taiwan, doesn't even bother to hide its forced oppression and abuse of the Uighur people, has utterly trampled any sign of democratic defiance in Hong Kong, and gets mighty prickly when you compare its leader-for-life to a cartoon character.

So yeah, there's no going back into that cave now. I'm incredibly pleased to see it being laid bare here, but remain sceptical as ever regarding who here will take that next and final step to at least ease their own conscience a little. I just couldn't see those titles or all those mtxes the same way again, not after GGG became a Tencent company. Not knowing what I know, which is oddly pretty much what everyone else knows, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

Our early and ongoing support served a function, an important one. Without it, there's every chance PoE wouldn't have gone very far. And we got years of entertainment out of that support. But that's all been hollowed out now, stripped of its value beyond that of a reminder that there is no PoE without GGG and there is no GGG without Tencent and there is no Tencent without the CCP.

And if you're cool with that, and can still play and enjoy the game, that's great for you. But if you're not, believe me, there's no better way of dealing with that unease than pruning the branch to save the tree.