CD Project Red finds itself in another Cyberpunk 2077 case as the game used the caption “Pooh” to censor game files in China.
CD Project Red doesn’t seem to be left alone about Cyberpunk 2077. The Cyberpunk 2077 appeared in faulty condition, full of bugs for PS4 and Xbox One, causing widespread echoes that caused the game to be withdrawn from PlayStation Store and CD Project Red to issue a refund. Since then, discussions about the developer crisis, CD Project board members receiving huge bonuses despite the problems of Cyberpunk 2077, and many other things have further tarnished the game’s reputation. And now it looks like CD Project Red could face another huge Cyberpunk 2077 controversy.
Recently, the source code for the CD Project games Red The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 was leaked to the Internet by hackers. The leak in the source code for Cyberpunk 2077 has brought a lot of interesting things so far, including an internal montage that highlights a lot of bugs and flaws in the game. However, what may be extremely problematic for CD Project Red in the future is the discovery that the developers of Cyberpunk 2077 appear to have used a label called “Pooh” to indicate content to be censored due to the Chinese appearance of the game.
The President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, is notoriously taken by a bad name when compared to Pooh, so much so that the character is heavily censored in the country. A Kingdom Hearts 3 covers Pooh in China, and many other video games censor the character’s name in the game’s chat. So CD Project Red used the word “Pooh” to label censored game files for the Chinese public, which could lead to clashes with the Chinese government later on.
They played with Chinese fire…
We may wonder why the developers of CD Project Red take such a risk with the source code of Cyberpunk 2077, but as Redditor traceitalian explains, “Yes, the chances are astronomically low that this has come to light”. The leak of the Cyberpunk 2077 source code is an incredibly rare situation, so you can be sure that no one at CD Project Red who knew about this Pooh China censorship flag would ever discover it.
This is not the first time CD Project Red has found itself in the middle of a controversy over Xi Jinping’s displeasure when compared to Pooh. The Taiwan-developed horror game Devotion was withdrawn from sale in various digital stores after it was revealed that the game contained the text “Xi Jinping Pooh Moron”. The game was later updated to remove this text and was to debut on the GOG digital store interface owned by the CD Project, only the company changed its mind at the last minute because of “alleged messages from players”. As we can imagine, this has resulted in quite a resentment on the internet.
CD Project Red has not yet commented on the latest development. It will be interesting to see if CD Project Red will feed the efforts of one of the investors to replace the company’s current CEO, or whether CDPR will retain its current leadership as it continues to work on improving Cyberpunk 2077.
The Cyberpunk 2077 has already been released for PC, PS4, Stadia and Xbox One, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions are also under development.
Source: VG24/7
–
