On Wednesday night, I fired off a series of tweets on my thoughts about developments in the gaming community over the last week, went to bed, and woke up to hundreds of notifications.
The past seven days has not been kind to members of the establishment gaming media who have gone unchallenged in their political posturing and hostility towards game creators and customers who don’t toe the line. On November 19, Kotaku Editor in Chief Stephen Totilo published an extended whine, complaining that his outlet had been unfairly blacklisted by Bethesda and Ubisoft, attempting to whip up support from the gaming community and shame the publishers for shutting him and his staff out.
The reaction from many in the industry was probably not what he was hoping for, with many developers, including individuals working for Ubisoft, taking to social media to explain exactly why they want nothing to do with Kotaku.
On Tuesday, we reported that Koei Tecmo had announced that they wouldn’t bring Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 to Europe or North America because of the backlash anticipated from media prudes who find any female video game character wearing clothing that reveals more than an ankle as “problematic.” After the news broke, online retailer Play-Asia announced on Twitter that they would be selling the English language version of the game for customers in regions where the game would not be released, specifically calling out “SJW nonsense.”
The response from several gaming journalists was to deride and malign Play-Asia and call for a boycott. Play-Asia’s response was for them to go pound sand.
Developer HuniePot piled on, offering $1 million for the rights to publish DOAX 3 in the US, while online retailer Instacodez offered $2 million for the rights to distribute the game in Europe.
It’s been a rough week for authoritarian pundits who’ve been acting as intellectual gatekeepers for what’s acceptable and what’s problematic in games. Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys.
Noah Dulis is the Deputy Managing Editor of Breitbart News and co-editor of Breitbart Tech. Follow him on Twitter @Marshal_Dov.
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