GOG, owned by CD Projekt, draws horror game Dedication hours after it was announced for the platform.
Red Candle Games’ Dedication got rave reviews for its intimate, family horror – but it was only available on Steam for six days before being removed from Valve’s store, meaning tons of people never got to play it. Dedication may never return to Steam, but the used to be gets a re-release via GOG.com on Dec 18, Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games announced on Twitter Wednesday. Subsequently, GOG released an update for Twitter announcing that it will no longer publish Dedication.
“It was announced earlier today that the match Dedication is coming to GOG, ”the company wrote in a tweet. “After receiving many messages from gamers, we decided not to list the game in our store.”
Earlier today it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. After receiving a lot of messages from gamers, we decided not to list the game in our store.
– GOG.COM (@GOGcom) December 16, 2020
Dedication was removed from Steam shortly after its release date in February 2019, after a meme criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping – who compared his resemblance to Winnie the Pooh – was discovered in the game. Chinese players have already started reviewing the game on Steam before Dedication was eventually pulled for a “full QA check,” the developer said at the time. The game has never returned. Red Candle Games has repeatedly apologized for the “critical and unprofessional mistake” that angered Chinese fans.
We’ve reached out to GOG and Red Candle Games for more information but haven’t heard back before publishing it. The Dedication GOG’s tweet has quickly garnered thousands of comments and retweets, most of which are from fans upset to see the game taken off the platform. Many speculate that the “many messages from gamers” refer to a similar backlash to what happened next Dedication‘s first release.
Like Games’ Red Candle Staying for the, Dedication is set in Taiwan. While Staying was focused on the White Terror period in Taiwan in the 1960s, Dedication followed a Taiwanese family intertwined with a religious sect and is largely set in the 1980s.
Taiwanese fans could get a physical copy of it Dedication in June, but it never got an English release. In February, Dedication was next added to the Harvard-Yenching Library Staying. The titles were the first two games to be added to the library’s prestigious Chinese collection, Harvard-Yenching librarian Ma Xiao-he told Polygon at the time. Last year, Polygon mentioned Dedication third on our Game of the Year 2019 list.
Updating: The original version of this story related to the announcement of Dedication comes to GOG. Shortly after this story was published, GOG posted a tweet stating that Dedication is no longer published on GOG. This story has been updated to reflect this information.