On Oct. 8, professional esports player Wai Chung Ng, who goes by the name of “Blitzchung” in Blizzard’s digital card game, Hearthstone, encouraged audience members to “liberate Hong Kong” in the “revolution of our age.” The organization swiftly punished him by revoking his earnings and banning him from competing in tournaments for a year.
Earlier in the fall, a similar controversy hit the NBA, as  Houston Rockets manager Daryl Morey was forced to take down a tweet supporting Hong Kong.
With the majority of the NBA and Blizzard’s western audiences up in arms over the leagues’ seem betrayal of Western ideals, it’s easy for people to bandwagon on the internet and express how the organizations should have supported Hong Kong over China, for the sake of human rights. Of course, there’s nothing innately wrong with someone expressing their opinion or joining a human rights petition, but in this case, these attacks are naive and misguided.
Morally speaking, perhaps major corporations should take an active stance to support human rights instead of protecting their own businesses; however, labeling Blizzard and the NBA as “China’s puppets” is an overstatement, as both organizations still operate with their own interests at heart. After all, the purpose of an organization is to make money, and with this viewpoint in mind, Blizzard and the NBA’s actions do make a lot of sense.
From a corporate view, however, both companies had every right to punish their respective members. Understandably, both the NBA and Blizzard do not want politics involved in their competitive environments, and so, in Blizzard’s case, distributing a punishment was a perfectly fair action to take.
In regard to the Houston Rockets specifically, the NBA was perfectly justified in taking a neutral stance. Many fans seem to think that the NBA was supporting China in their statement, but the NBA was simply attempting to maintain a nonpolitical environment while trying to stabilize profits as a countermeasure against Morey’s politically polarizing tweet. Just because the NBA didn’t outright back the Rockets, which would be franchising suicide, it doesn’t mean that its leaders support China.
For its part, Blizzard definitely could have handled the situation better, since Ng’s punishment, in which he was banned from competing for a year and his earnings were revoked, was too harsh. To its credit, Blizzard later shortened the punishment and guaranteed his prize money.
People commenting on the internet often have good intentions, but it’s easy to get caught a kind of mob mentality, which can be seen by the basic “boycott Blizzard” tag that echoed around in a Reddit thread. But these actions are meaningless, and eventually just fizzle out and are forgotten. If observers truly want to make a difference, making a bad guy out of corporations instead of China itself isn’t a winning strategy.