There are, broadly, (at least) two competing and opposed groups of crazy people on Twitter. They’re not equally bad (I’d rather offend Cheong and his ilk any day) or moronic, but they’re both pretty bad and moronic, and to appease one is to inflame the other. I don’t think they’re equally large, either, though, and although what for the sake of context I will call the Cheongites tend to be overrepresented among gamers, I think in general appeasing their foes is a better business decision.
I’m fine with them removing these two bits. The game itself is very good and these adjustments don’t negatively impact the experience one iota. The discourse surrounding the game, however, is likely to forever remain a mess because of how poorly this was handled, which as someone who’s followed the game since 2015 is very disappointing to see. :(
I agree.
However, couldn’t everyone be satisfied by simply including both the edited and the unedited versions of the game when you buy it? Then the buyer could simply choose which version to install.
But is that it? From all the uproar you’d think they had a room where you massacred trans hookers or something. (Similar to how you could shoot the strippers in Duke3D)
Also, devs sometimes put messages to themselves or each other in places you can’t see in the game itself. In-jokes and stuff. If you’re hacking the game and find some weird message, who cares? It’s not even meant for public consumption. You have no idea how it’s supossed to be taken. The level of hysteria and moral panic nowadays is so out of control.
By itself, the “fagbag” message isn’t too damning. It’s offensive terminology, but you’re correct that it’s not meant for players to see, and only people noclipping or fooling around with dev tools would come across it. If that’s all there were to this, I think the message may have just been quietly removed.
The problem for Voidpoint is that along with that, they have the “Olgay” joke, and a bunch of really shitty correspondence from a dev on social media about LGBTQ issues. It creates the impression, fair nor not, that Voidpoint as a whole condones a regressive stance on this stuff. Maybe there’s only one dude on the team that sucks, and he slipped all this by management, or the company culture at Voidpoint encourages juvenile bro-tastic interactions. Either way, if LGBTQ progressiveness is core to your beliefs, then whatever was going on at Voidpoint isn’t going to resonate positively.
It’s a shame because the game is quite good, but now a portion of Voidpoint’s energy is being spent on dealing with this.
Well, the problem with that theory is the guy with trans issues and the guy with women issues on the Discord were two different guys. Maybe it’s only two guys who aren’t afraid of airing their baggage, but…
While the game’s no longer on the top sellers list, at least before the shit hit the fan Fury managed to garner enough interest to pass the 100k sales threshold on Steam, and the massive negativity push hasn’t managed to drop game’s overall rating into mixed. I suppose that’s one of the benefits of a backlash beginning when you have a 97% user score!
You don’t even have to be fired up about any particular political or cultural stance or viewpoint to be upset at this, because what they’ve done is simply bad business. They ran a shop where people could interface with social media without filters. They allowed their employees to embed content in the game, open and obscured, that any rational person would understand would offend a not insubstantial part of their potential player base. Arguably, they mismanaged their response, though here they did better than many companies I think.
Long before you get to the point of arguing political stances, the company fucked up in several ways that violate Business 101 stuff.
Well, really, the stuff they cut isn’t germane or essential to the game as a whole. It has zero added value and contributes zero to the artistic integrity of the game overall, IMO. And we’re not talking about a cultural landmark that we need to preserve for all time. It’s a disposable piece of entertainment culture like the vast majority of games, and unless you’re a historian of video games there’s really no reason to even have any interest in preserving the original version IMO.
