Chinese gamers threaten keyboard maker Cherry with boycott after storm over giveaway aimed at ‘men only’
- German company apologises and promises to investigate bad-tempered online exchanges with followers after promotion goes off the rails
A German company best known for keyboards popular with online gamers faces a boycott in China after it fired back with graphic language at social media users who complained about a giveaway aimed at male customers only.
On Saturday, Cherry’s China division offered to give four mechanical keyboards away to male gamers, without any mention of women who make up a sizeable part of the Chinese gaming community.
Followers on Weibo who asked if women had a chance of winning the prizes, were told: “Of course we will send [the prize to female winners], the prizes are not awarded according to gender at all.”
Later that day, Cherry China amended its giveaway offer to keyboards for men and make-up for women, but explaining that prizes awards would not be determined by a winner’s sex because the software that ran the offer did not distinguish between genders.
“Does a giveaway for male gamers mean that we think women are not suited for gaming?” Cherry China asked users on Weibo. “This kind of black-and-white thinking does not match a primary schooler’s reading comprehension ability. The giveaway platform does not even have a function that sorts users by gender.”
Gamers will still not satisfied with the stereotypes presented by the giveaways. One responded: “Do men have to like gaming and women have to love lipsticks and perfume? Please can you just leave the stereotypes to one side and sell your keyboards.”
This prompted the company’s official account to go on the attack. “When did I say that men have to love gaming and women must love lipsticks, are you m***********g crazy?” it said.
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Women complained of abuse and harassment from male Weibo users after they asked why they were not included in the keyboard giveaway.
Han Bohan, Cherry China’s chief executive, stepped into the Weibo storm on Saturday by posting: “How is a gaming giveaway aimed at men different from beauty bloggers launching lipstick giveaways every day for women?”
By Monday, calls for gamers to boycott Cherry products until the company apologised and the Weibo hashtags #BoycottCherry and #CherryChina had pulled in more than 182 million hits.
“I was a WOWer [World of Warcraft player] and use a Cherry keyboard, but if Cherry China will not say sorry to us, I will find another keyboard for my new MacBook Pro,” a Chinese Twitter user named Ziying wrote.
Weibo users also pointed out that a 2012 ad for one of Cherry’s keyboards featured a faceless model wearing a keyboard print T-shirt bearing the slogan “push my buttons” and hands on her breasts.
On Monday, Cherry’s German head office apologised for the Weibo storm and promised to “look further” into the matter.
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“Please give us some more time for investigation, we take this very seriously,” the company said on Twitter. “But please be sure that we’ll apologise for this in the first place. We ask for your understanding while we’re taking care of that.”
Cherry China and Han Bohan did not respond to requests from the South China Morning Post for comment.
Sexism in the gaming world is not new. In the summer of 2014, the so-called Gamergate controversy raged across the industry after several notable women were subject to campaigns of harassment including threats of death, rape and doxing – exposure of private material online – by anonymous individuals.
