Blizzard appears to have kicked over a hornet's nest.
A couple days ago (Oct 6) Hong Kong Hearthstone player Blitzchung (@blitzchungHS) called for the liberation of his country in a post-game interview with InvenGlobal (
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/9242/hong-kong-player-blitzchung-calls-for-liberation-of-his-country-in-post-game-interview). This got very little attention - in the US at least - until the day after when Blizzard removed Blitzchung from Grandmasters and banned him from competing in Hearthstone for a year. It also took back all the prize money he had won (
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/9254/blizzard-has-removed-blitzchung-from-grandmasters-and-banned-him-from-competing-in-hearthstone-following-his-on-stream-hong-kong-protest).
This... did not go over so well. The Internet more or less blew up, largely with support for Blitzchung and condemnation of Blizzard. The subreddit (
https://www.reddit.com/r/blizzard) got so heated that it got locked, though many of the threads were popular enough to hit r/all. Some of the top posts still visible there include instructions on how to delete your account, comparisons with Tiananmen, and similar. One popular photo shows that someone covered up the plaque in front of Blizzard HQ that says "Every voice matters" with a plain white sheet of paper.
Blizzard also fired both of the casters who conducted the interview, despite any lack of evidence that they were involved or knew what was going to happen.
It's hard to see this as anything more than corporate appeasement to the official Chinese government, particularly given what happened after NBA owner Daryl Morey's tweet. The math here doesn't favor the Americans - the Chinese market is worth many orders of magnitude more than all the ill-will and cancelled subscriptions. Activision/Blizzard have (as far as I can tell) been mum since the initial official announcement.
The timing is not very good for Blizzard, though, what with Blizzcon just around the corner. I can't believe that event will go off without at least one related incident.