The fact that they voluntarily censored it in Russia and China is essentially definitive proof that they don’t actually care about the issue, but rather think it will gain them more money in the US. If they cared, they would have required that China and Russia be the bad guy and force them, but they’d clearly prefer to take the path of least resistance.
I think it's probably a bit more nuanced than that...
Much like how tons of companies seem to jump on the LGBT logo type stuff, I suspect this kind of pro-LGBT sentiment is driven by people within the company who genuinely mean it and then it's up to the company to:
(a) embrace their suggestions in the name of boosting employee morale and involvement
(b) say no to sidestep potential political implications and potentially unsettle workplace morale
The company fundamentally does not give a flying f*ck about the issue at hand, but it manages to work its way up along a chain of individuals who either do believe in the motives or are unwilling to be the one to say no until it actually gets put out officially. If there ever was a "there's big money in this stuff" thought, I seriously doubt it was a significant motivator as the person thinking that cynically would doubtless be aware of international considerations too.
I'm not trying to defend companies here at all, to be clear. I struggle to believe any company that isn't taking extremely proactive steps at the risk of their bottom line don't actually care about anything on an ethical level.
They can care about the issue and still be greedy and care about money way more. The issue with letting governments "force" things like that is that they might just ban the game entirely and forever.
See the documentary "The Corporation". The basic premise of this doc is that corporations are sociopaths / psychopaths. Corporations do not "care" about anything - only people can do that.
Companies do not have ethics, morals, etc. Only individual people have those. The film also talks about how any group of people tend to lose their humanity because in any group, it is easy to fall back on "someone else made the decision", "it's someone else's problem", "I didn't have the final say-so on this", etc.
IMO we too often have given companies attributes and rights of individuals that they don't deserve because they don't behave like individuals, and are incapable of having things like morals.
