#voidpoint

Voidpoint, for their handling of Ion Fury. It looks like an extremely good build engine shooter, but a mapper hid some bigoted humor in a level and Voidpoint dug in their heels and stood up "against SJW censorship." Big red flags. They don't deserve my business.

I struggle to care about anything Gearbox has been doing, exclusively because of Randy Pitchford. He's an incredibly suspicious dude -- there's claims he stole money from Aliens: Colonial Marines to bankroll Borderlands 2, there's the whole bizarre "magic trick on a flash drive" gaffe, the fact he "rescued" the Duke Nukem franchise and has left it to rot with increasingly worse ports and remasters of Duke Nukem 3D (and only Duke Nukem 3D)... Randy announced he was leaving Gearbox just a few days ago to pursue a movie production career, but also, the more Gearbox does with the "humor" in Borderlands, the more I groan at how much it sucks. Randy Pitchford or not, I don't want to buy or play anything from Gearbox, at least for a while.

THQ Nordic hosted an AMA on 8chan, a website known for hosting illegal pornography and being the heart of Qanon. They tried to make a series of weak apologies, but not a single one of them came off as sincere, because they were all full of misdirection and excuses about how they "didn't know" what 8chan was. I don't believe them for a second. People all the way up the Nordic ladder seemed to be in on it. Unsurprisingly, right after that disaster, they announced a suite of long-requested, fan-favorite remasters for games like Battle for Bikini Bottom and Destroy All Humans. It was blatantly transparent they were trying to smooth things over and hope people forget about the 8chan thing. I certainly won't.

I'm also going to start avoiding anything associated with Tommy Tallarico. He always came off as kind of a goober on Electric Playground, but it sounds increasingly like he's a toxic weirdo and a diva. It's harder to cite this one because it sounds like Tallarico is trying to get out in front of it and keep it quiet, but there are rumblings from people who met him that he's a loudmouthed jerk. He's been known to crack a lot of "snowflake sjw needs a safe space?" type jokes, and he followed a lot of the right wing brainworm types on twitter. He's also spearheading the whole "Earthworm Jim 4" project, which involves "getting all the original developers back together" -- including the ones who have willingly outed themselves as angry bigots. Despite claims that the bad eggs aren't really involved, their work is still being co-promoted. Tallarico is ignorant at best, and actively toxic at worst. Art cannot be separated from artist as long as money is involved.

There's probably more, but those are the four strongest examples I can think of right now. I'd maybe put Ubisoft in there, but mostly that's because I'm very bored with Ubisoft's output and have been for a long time, irregardless of what's wrong with their company culture.

Ion Fury - Cyberpunk 2095 #NintendoSwitch #Censorship #IonFury #FPS

The year is 2095 and Betamax Tapes are back in fashion. Cyber punks have gone rogue on the streets, somehow overthrowing the police, military, the CIA and all the world’s power structures by strafing left and right and looking intimidating. What else is back in fashion? Old school build-engine FPS games. Ion Fury takes all the nostalgia and design structure that make classic FPS so great, and…

"We won't actually be removing the slurs!"

Voidpoint and 3D Realms continue to dig a deep hole for themselves while backtracking on Ion Fury's controversy.

WHAT THE FUCK BOMBSEHLL, VOIDPOINT, AND ION FURY