Geoguessr has pulled out of this year’s Esports World Cup following a mass protest from players and map creators alike yesterday. A wave of protest posts filled the offical Discord, and many of the most popular maps were set to private, leading the company’s behind the game’s CEO to announce the withdrawal on Twitter and Discord.
Geoguessr’s all about players determining their location on a world map by finding real-world clues in randomly placed photographs around the globe, and had been announced as the latest addition to Saudi Arabia’s annual gaming event earlier this week. Saudi Arabia, a country that is currently attempting to better its world standing via sportswashing ventures like the Esports World Cup to distract from a record of human rights abuses.
In reaction to this announcement, a collection of roughly 50 of the biggest map creators set their creations to private, meaning that players could not use them to play the game. One creator, speaking to reporter Ryan Fae, stated that a low-end estimate of the total of players on these blacked out maps is 23.6 million, with many of these maps being used in official tournaments and team duels. Think of these maps as player-owned creations inside Geoguessr, so while the developers of the game obviously own the game itself, the maps are under the control of those who make them, allowing for this mass privatisation.
In a statement released by the protesting map creators, the collective wrote, “The EWC is a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record. Groups targets by the government include women, LGBT people, apostates and atheists, political dissenters, migrant workers in the Kafala system, religious minorities, and many others. The subjegation of these groups is extensive and pervasive. Members of these groups are routinely subjected to discrimination, imprisonment, torture, and even public executions. These severe human rights violations are well-documented and indisputable.”
You can read the full statement here, in which the collective further expressses its disdain for GeoGuessr’s inclusion in the EWC and why its members are taking the stance they have. It concludes: “You don’t play games with human rights”.
In addition, many Geoguessr players took to the official GeoGuessr Discord channel to enact their own protest, flooding channels with “Cancel Riyadh event”. In response to these actions from the community, the CEO and co-founder of Geoguessr announced the removal of Geoguessr from the Esports World Cup.
Their statement starts by explaining that they had good intentions, wanting to “engage with the community in the Middle-East and to spread GeoGuessr’s core mission of let everyone Explore the World.” However, it goes on to state that following the community making it loud and clear that this decision “does not align what GeoGuessr stands for”, they decided to withrdraw from the EWC immediately. You can read the full statement here.
What this has shown is that the GeoGuessr community has more backbone than most when it comes to standing up for what it believes is right. One is left to wonder, if GeoGuessr can be forced to shift its stance on its participation on the EWC, perhaps players’ll adopt similar tactics with other publishers and studios. It’s something to think about. Meanwhile, kudos to the GeoGuessr community for taking a stand.
