Gaming the West
Marvel’s shooter censors critics of China while collecting your data.
At first glance, Marvel Rivals plays like any other global franchise tie-in: a colorful, fast-paced hero shooter borrowing from Overwatch, Valorant, and decades of comic lore. The game is a third person, 6v6 team shooter featuring iconic Marvel characters like Iron Man, Storm, and Loki. Developed by Chinese tech giant NetEase in partnership with Marvel Games, it blends chaotic multiplayer combat with destructible maps and fast paced action, built to appeal to Western audiences through a free-to-play live service model. It is free-to-play and flush with familiar faces—Iron Man, Spider-Man, Storm, Black Panther—yet something more subtle lurks beneath the marketing gloss. As players worldwide discovered earlier of this year, certain phrases typed into the chat box instantly vanish. Not because of profanity or threats. Because they cross political red lines drawn in Beijing.
In Marvel Rivals, players have discovered that politically sensitive phrases like “Free Taiwan,” “Free Hong Kong,” “Tiananmen,” and “Winnie the Pooh” are systematically blocked—even for English-speaking users. Meanwhile, phrases like “I hate America” and “Free Palestine” pass through unfiltered. These censorship patterns have been documented through in-game testing and shared widely on Reddit, Steam, and TikTok.
Yet outside the game, NetEase’s broader ecosystem paints a different picture: its flagship news platform 163.com freely promotes provocative, often one-sided headlines about Western leaders. In recent days, the site published stories accusing Donald Trump of threatening war and treading into “dangerous territory,” quoting Russian officials and fueling geopolitical tension. No such scrutiny or critique is leveled at China’s own leadership. In the NetEase universe, criticism of the Chinese government is silenced—while inflammatory or sensationalist stories about the West are broadcast with impunity. The imbalance isn’t just in gameplay—it’s in the entire information architecture.
While NetEase maintains studios abroad and insists on its status as a global gaming developer, the company remains firmly anchored in the Chinese system of government oversight. One glimpse into that governance architecture is the China Government Procurement Network—the central platform through which the state manages public contracts and agency accreditation. Though English-language mirrors of the site exist, the original Chinese portal won’t load from U.S. networks, a likely result of geofencing or DNS-level filtering. This is not a quirk of infrastructure—it is a deliberate expression of asymmetric governance: a system where Chinese institutions demand full visibility and control over domestic and outbound digital systems, while restricting reciprocal access and transparency from abroad.
According to the registry, the procurement domain is operated by the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China and administered through a Communist Party-controlled office at No. 3 Sanlihe South Street in Beijing. Its functions extend well beyond purchasing—into regulatory enforcement, international negotiations, tax administration, and oversight of foreign-invested enterprises. In short, this is not merely a marketplace. It is a bureaucratic instrument of control. And for companies like NetEase, participation in this system binds their international platforms—no matter how Western-facing—to the legal and strategic apparatus of the Chinese state.
The question is increasingly urgent. NetEase is one of China’s largest internet companies. It operates under the oversight of the Chinese Communist Party and, per PRC law, is required to comply with government requests—including access to user data.
According to its corporate profile, NetEase Games—the company’s online gaming division—is a “leading global developer and publisher” with studios in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States. Its partnerships span major entertainment brands like Warner Bros., Mojang (a Microsoft subsidiary), and Disney, with titles including Naraka: Bladepoint, Knives Out, and Marvel Rivals.
Yet despite this outwardly multinational image, NetEase remains a Chinese company headquartered in Hangzhou and subject to strict data compliance laws imposed by Beijing.
The result is an unequal system: a game developed under Chinese jurisdiction, for foreign audiences, in which players can type “I hate America” but are blocked from saying “Free Taiwan.” While Marvel Rivals is distributed globally via Steam and carries the Marvel brand, the game’s underlying infrastructure—its code, its telemetry, its censorship protocols—was built in China.
YET MARVEL RIVALS IS NOT AVAILABLE IN MAINLAND CHINA
Despite being developed by Hangzhou-based NetEase and built on a Western intellectual property, the game has not been granted the required ISBN license from China’s National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA). Without this approval, no game—domestic or foreign—can legally launch in the Chinese market. Games that depict sensitive themes such as Taiwan, Tibet, LGBTQ+ identities, or anti-authoritarian content are routinely denied approval. Even Tencent, the country’s largest gaming giant, has faced delays, rewrites, and censorship mandates to bring titles like Honor of Kings and PUBG to Chinese audiences.
The absence of Marvel Rivals from Chinese storefronts is not an oversight. It is a feature of a larger strategy: to develop and deploy products optimized for global markets, while insulating them from domestic political scrutiny. At the same time, the censorship apparatus embedded in the game—one that automatically blocks words like “Free Taiwan,” “Tiananmen,” or “Xi Jinping”—remains active for users around the world.
This raises a deeper question: is Marvel Rivals part of a growing trend of digital exports that align with Beijing’s ideological goals abroad? Or is it simply a byproduct of China’s dystopian censorship regime, leaking into global platforms through the companies it licenses and controls?
Either way, the asymmetry is striking. The game isn’t playable in China, but its Chinese-made systems regulate speech and monitor behavior in the West. It is, at minimum, a soft weapon of influence, coded not just for play—but for control.
NetEase has yet to publicly address the censorship. Disney has remained silent. But the backlash is building. Threads across Reddit, TikTok, and Steam discussions are filled with screenshots and test results. In one post, a player writes: “You can say ‘Taiwan sucks’ but not ‘Free Taiwan’? This is CCP garbage.” Another commenter adds: “I just typed ‘I love America’ and it got flagged. But ‘I hate America’ is fine. What the hell?”
Compounding concerns are NetEase’s own patents and academic contributions to what it calls EOMM—“Engagement Optimized Matchmaking.” This system, developed and refined by NetEase researchers in 2017 and beyond, uses player behavior, psychology, and game performance data to adjust matchmaking outcomes in real-time. The goal is to prolong engagement and maximize emotional investment. But as researchers from the University of York and others have noted, these systems can also be used to profile player reactions, identify stress points, and influence mood.
According to its corporate profile, NetEase Games—the online gaming arm of NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES; HKEX: 9999)—positions itself as a “leading global developer and publisher” with studios in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States. Its partnerships include major entertainment brands like Warner Bros., Mojang (a Microsoft subsidiary), and Disney, while its portfolio spans hits such as Naraka: Bladepoint, Knives Out, and Marvel Rivals. That outward-facing, multinational image stands in stark contrast to its deep ties to the Chinese state: despite offices around the world, NetEase remains headquartered in Hangzhou and fully subject to People’s Republic of China (PRC) data and censorship laws.
This dichotomy is striking: a platform marketed as global and Western-facing sits at the center of an unequal system of governance—one where players can freely type “I hate America” in Marvel Rivals, but are blocked from saying “Free Taiwan.” The game’s chat moderation system, telemetry capture, anti-cheat tools, and backend infrastructure are all built under the oversight of Chinese law, even as its players are overwhelmingly located abroad.
One way to interpret the game’s design—based on its telemetry, censorship systems, and alignment with Chinese data laws—is as a soft weapon of influence, disguised as a superhero shooter.
ONE WAY TO INTERPRET THE GAME’S DESIGN IS AS A SOFT WEAPON OF INFLUENCE, DISGUISED AS A SUPERHERO SHOOTER
The game monitors what you say. It uses behavioral data to predict your emotional triggers. It restricts discussion of topics deemed politically sensitive by a foreign regime. And it does so while operating under a licensing agreement with a U.S. media conglomerate, Marvel’s parent company, Disney.
A close read of Marvel Rivals’ privacy policy reveals additional concerns. While the global-facing documents suggest a separation between Chinese and international data handling, they also admit that “some data may be stored or processed in jurisdictions including the PRC,” and that compliance with “local laws” is mandatory. Under China’s Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law, any such data—if accessible within the PRC—can be subject to state review or demand.
The game also collects more than just gameplay stats. The privacy notice confirms it monitors device type, geolocation, IP address, language preferences, user interactions, and chat history. Players who link their accounts to social platforms or purchase cosmetic upgrades transmit additional metadata.
In one statement provided to gaming outlet WowVendor, NetEase said it had disbanded its North American development team after the initial phase of the game’s rollout. “We thank the team for their contributions,” the statement read. The layoffs occurred shortly after Marvel Rivals achieved open beta success and became one of Steam’s most downloaded hero shooters in its category.
Multiple Reddit users interpreted the layoffs differently: “This wasn’t a cost issue,” one commenter wrote. “They always planned to gut the U.S. team after launch.” Another added: “Keep the optics clean for the West, then hand the reins to Hangzhou.”
Meanwhile, player counts are declining. A report from VideoGamer notes that Steam engagement has dropped sharply, driven by gameplay balance issues, lack of content, and growing distrust. “There’s a major flaw in the game’s core engine,” one review said. “Combine that with censorship and weird matchmaking and you lose people fast.”
And yet the broader implications are not just technical. As one player summarized on TikTok: “It’s not that the game is broken. It’s that it doesn’t feel like it was made for us.”
What Marvel Rivals represents is bigger than any balance patch or character drop. It is a case study in how a foreign company—obligated to a regime that enforces speech control and mandatory data access—can build a global platform under the guise of entertainment. The censorship is real. The data collection is real. The behavioral telemetry, matchmaking manipulation, and asymmetric content moderation are real.
Games are not neutral. They are built. And Marvel Rivals, whatever its future as a franchise, is already a functional prototype—for something far more powerful than gaming.