China has very strict certification rules, as the authors of Cyberpunk 2077 were well aware of. It turned out that the developers of the game marked with the tag “Winnie the Pooh” all the controversial content that should be removed before the release in China. The problem is that this character has been banned in the country since 2017.
This became known from internal CD PROJEKT documents leaked to the network, among which were the source data of Cyberpunk 2077.
Judging by the screenshot published by hackers, Polish developers used eight tags to censor different content. Seven of them related to topics such as nudity, drugs and religion, and the eighth with the name Censor_WinnieThePooh (otherwise “Winnie the Pooh”) concerned prohibited materials for China.
This information can turn into serious problems for the authors of Cyberpunk 2077. The image of Winnie the Pooh is considered extremely offensive in China, since President Xi Jinping was previously compared to him.
The Chinese authorities have already had to cancel licenses for games after mentioning this bear. Such a situation occurred, for example, with Devotion. Which CD PROJEKT itself did not release in GOG because of the risk of spoiling relations with China.
While Cyberpunk 2077 has not officially been released in China, but this does not prevent Chinese gamers from playing it. Recall that at its premiere week, Cyberpunk 2077 was the best-selling game in the Chinese Steam segment. Before that, China was the leader in the number of PC pre-orders of the title.
CD PROJEKT has not commented on the “merged” information at the moment.