Most of the time when a smaller country is featured as part of large movie or game property it's a good thing. The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies have made the country of New Zealand tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and a half, so you might have expected the South American nation of Bolivia, to receive some benefit from being featured in the latest Ghost Recon game.
While there may be some money made from the game being set there though, it could mostly come from the courts. Bolivia's government has threatened to sue France and developer Ubisoft over the depiction of its country in Wildlands.
This is something that a few people expected at some point, as Wildlands is not flattering of the country. While there's no denying that the game paints it as a beautiful landscape, the fact that it has it as a country in a near-future where it's dominated and controlled by the Santa Blanca drug cartel, is hardly a positive image. That's not likely to please any government, especially one which might feel its tourist industry could be harmed by this negative portrayal.
That said, it is hard to argue the case for a government such as France's, from deliberately intervening and stopping one of its most successful companies from creating some form of artistic endeavour.
To defend itself ahead of the potential lawsuit, Ubisoft highlighted this, citing its creation of this future Bolivia as artistic interpretation:
"Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is a work of fiction, similar to movies or TV shows. Like all Tom Clancy’s games from Ubisoft, the game takes place in a modern universe inspired by reality, but the characters, locations and stories are all fantasies created solely for entertainment purposes," it said (via PCGamer). "Bolivia was chosen as the background of this game based on its magnificent landscapes and rich culture. While the game’s premise imagines a different reality than the one that exists in Bolivia today, we do hope that the in-game world comes close to representing the country’s beautiful topography, and that players enjoy exploring the diverse and open landscapes it moved us to create."
