The EZA and Giant Bomb responses sounded like "but muh ACCESS" and I'm kinda disappointed in them.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
THQ Nordic holding an AMA on... 8chan (UP: website linked to multiple mass shootings) READ THREADMARKS
- Thread starter Deleted member 401
- Start date
I listened to all 3 of those podcasts and i don't understand how you could possibly come to that conclusion, especially since those 2 in particular are subscription based sites that rely on their personalities more so than their video game coverage.
The bombcast spent almost an entire segment ripping them, with zero defense of the company.
EZA admittedly covered the story as a company making a mistake, rather than diving into the more sinister nature of what actually happened and didn't spend as much time on it as it deserved, but again there was zero defense of THQ, THQ would not be happy about the coverage they got here, it was all negative.
Beastcast ripped them as well, zero defense of the company.
This idea that video game outlets are beholden to these publishers is so outdated, there's a reason why publishers are moving to influencers, because the media outlets won't do what they want, and they literally just gave the biggest release of the year from EA a 60 on metacritic/opencritic, 60 to another major release from Microsoft, a sub 60 opencritic to a Bandai Namco release, and just last holiday gave a 50 to Fallout, one of the biggest franchises in gaming.
I only listened to East but Vinny's response was kinda weak and Dan was largely silent.
As an aside, I'm a little surprised that members of an Austrian company didn't quickly nope out after the site immediately mentioned their least favourite son and started posting pictures of his friends. I'm almost certainly getting Austria mixed up with Germany's aggressive denazification efforts, but am I wrong to imagine that Hitler would often be seen as a sore spot?
Dan is almost always silent on big news stories that involve larger things than the industry directly. and let's be honest would you really want to hear what Dan has to say on the subject. Vinny's response was far from weak, he repeatedly stated how stupid the company was. There was no defense at all for THQ
You should listen to the Bombcast then. They were 100% not pulling any punches with this.
The only real way you could say that they didn't go far enough is that they didn't explicitly call for anyone's heads, but it's not like they were all that soft (they mention 8chan's child porn connection a lot).
Yeah, it seems like people are really reaching here to try and criticize the gaming media. As if sites like Giant Bomb are scared to criticize games/publishers.
Nobody at GB cared about Metro or Darksiders 3 or probably any other upcoming THQ game, so this is a super weird take
Thanks for the summary, much appreciated. I got banned earlier in the thread, so I couldn't respond to this earlier. When they say that one of the PR folks leans to the "far left", do they elaborate on what makes him "far left"? I don't like the term, but curious about whether they go into any specifics when they label him as such.
Regarding the EZA podcast: Keep in mind that it becomes publicly available on Friday, but they always record it on Tuesday ahead of the group stream for example. Considering that the AMA must have happened just shortly beforehand and the confusion and immediate backlash was still ongoing, I was actually kind of surprised that Kyle wedged it in at all. In my opinion they didn't say anything wrong and I'm sure the response would have been harsher if they had more time to grasp and digest all the details.
I don't believe this was posted, but the good folks at VG247 also covered this. They did a good job, no beating around the bush, which is not surprising coming from the outlet who took a hard no coverage stance towards CDPR/GOG for propping up Gamer Gate and their homophobic and transphobic tweets.
THQ Nordic fails to acquire a good PR manager, hosts AMA on website delisted from Google for child porn
THQ Nordic fails to acquire a good PR manager, hosts AMA on website delisted from Google for child porn
I agree, THQ's refusal to even respond to their questions leaves them no choice but to use the nuclear option.
Or at the very least, go ahead and cover a game but at the end of an article/video bring up the fact that the company is associated with child porn.
Yeah VG247 tends to do ok, but it's odd how they went "we're pulling support and coverage" at GOG for making a tweet nudging at Gamergate, but when THQ basically throws a party in Gamergate's backyard, the response is not that.
You're right, I will try to reach out to them, not that it will make any difference, but I guess it's worth a shot.
You know, I've been thinking...
- 8chan has users that harasses and leaks people's personal information.
- They have users that push people towards suicide.
- And lastly, they're a bunch of sick pedos.
THQ Nordic... was essentially hanging out with criminals.
I was thinking that maybe including the word in some of these article titles would help catch people's attention more, and it would also reinforce the severity of the situation.
Maybe not.
- 8chan has users that harasses and leaks people's personal information.
- They have users that push people towards suicide.
- And lastly, they're a bunch of sick pedos.
THQ Nordic... was essentially hanging out with criminals.
I was thinking that maybe including the word in some of these article titles would help catch people's attention more, and it would also reinforce the severity of the situation.
Maybe not.
No one has suggested anything illegal, single post burner account.
The only thing that I would really criticise about GB's coverage was when Ben tried to attribute it some dumb, lowly worker and that the higher ups wouldn't know better. Otherwise they were really good and I don't understand how you could have come away with this impression, especially considering how toothless so many other outlets have been
I can't speak to the EZA coverage tho
What are you talking about
It's a single post account. Don't bother, just report and hope the staff actually takes action.
Speaking personally, "hanging out with criminals" is an understatement, not a highlight, when English includes tax criminals and such in the term.
You're ignoring half of the crew on the show. Alex was the one to present the story and did not pull any punches at all. He called them out for their BS and Abby was right there with him. Vinny was pretty strong about how he felt bad for the developers that work hard while these dumbasses are trying to poison the well for their games. He's not one to get overly mad on podcasts like Alex and Abby will, so this was him being mad about it.
Last edited:
I love GB, they are my favorite games media outlet.
Their coverage of this was garbage, and they need to do better.
Their response was basically "well, this must be a (very big) mistake". All evidence we have points to this not being a mistake at all, but a calculated effort at high levels of the company to court an audience of some of the worst people humanity has to offer. THQ did this with the expectation that those who are disgusted by their behavior could be placated by a fake apology and a bogus claim of ignorance, and GB's response made good on that assumption.
I don't know, I think, especially on the Bombcast when they were talking about it as information was coming in hot, they did fine. I also don't think that their apology is enough for them to wipe their hands and be like well THQ is good, now. They raked them over the coals sufficiently and I'm sure they will continue to do so as more of the story comes together/THQ continues to do absolutely nothing. They never painted it as them accidentally doing this without realising what 8chan is and accurately explained what 8chan is and why this is such a big deal
I think this is a good point. People want everyone to be mad in the same way, but that's not fair to people. Everyone at GB condemned this. When there are so many other outlets that covered this in the most milquetoast way I don't think that GB's coverage is the one we should be focusing on
I'm gonna hit them up with a Tweet, and hope they cover it in their next podcast. Hope others help as well. The more coverage, the better.
That is absolutely not the impression I got listening to the Bombcast. Haven't listened to the Beastcast yet. Jeff basically summed it up at the end by saying something along the lines of, "I can see a scenario where someone higher up OKd this without knowing what they were doing, but you really need to know what you're doing."
They called out multiple times that the actual posts made by the THQ rep on 8Chan made it look like that person, at least, knew exactly what they were doing.
GB's response was fine. GB West was recording while details on the case was still coming out, so it's natural they wouldn't have all the details at the time of recording. GB East went in hard and Alex in particular slammed them over and over. I have no idea what people expect.
I'm not really sure what people are wanting from GB on this. If you need Jeff Gerstmann to tell you that tacitly promoting child pornography is a bad look, you're a little too far gone for the Bombcast to be your moral compass. They covered it, it was obvious in their discussion that they thought it was a bad move and the discussion on the Beastcast doubled down on it.
I dont really understand the whole situation. I mean, first THQ tweets that they're doing an AMA on 8chan, but say that they have no idea why. Does this mean that they got some invite from someone over at 8chan to do an AMA, or what is the "we have no idea why" part referring to?
And was this tweet done right before (like minutes) the AMA start? If not, i would assume that people would tell them about what 8chan is about, before starting the AMA at all. So why go through with the AMA in that case? And why not even do some research about 8chan first?
If the PR guy at THQ knew about what 8chan is about, why would he publically announce that on Twitter? Surely he must have known that there would be a huge backlash from that.
Pretty strange situation all around.
And was this tweet done right before (like minutes) the AMA start? If not, i would assume that people would tell them about what 8chan is about, before starting the AMA at all. So why go through with the AMA in that case? And why not even do some research about 8chan first?
If the PR guy at THQ knew about what 8chan is about, why would he publically announce that on Twitter? Surely he must have known that there would be a huge backlash from that.
Pretty strange situation all around.
It's not strange at all. They knew what they were doing. They even followed up with a tweet that said someone named Mark would take care of the "nasty stuff". People warned them about the site immediately after they posted the announcement, linking to articles about the nature of the site. They ignored those tweets and instead "liked" other more questionably ones supporting their decision. They openly engaged with the racist pedos during said AMA and only after it happened they somehow got shocked that it went the way it did.
They. Fucking. Knew. What. They. Were. Doing. It wasn't strange at all. It was malicious from the start.
That tweet can be read as they're going ahead and doing something incredibly stupid (to put it very, very mildly) knowing full well the consequences (which have been none, really; thus far). They're going to do it anyway for no real apparent reason - that they've stated publicly at least.
Think of it like sticking a knife in a wall socket. You know it's dumb, so why are you doing it again? You dunno you just are. Except in this case, the knife is your company's public image, and the wall socket is a forum of pedophiles, racists, and Nazi's.
Last edited:
I hope this isn't the real swyter .... if so fuck this. Never going to touch his stuff again.
They left the link of the AMA to the pedophile and nazi site for more than 12 hrs. They got called out for this by a tweet from an MS VP.
They knew exactly what they were doing from the beginning but they may have miscalculated the aftermath.
Anyhow, congrats to THQ for their new nazi and pedophile customers.
Thanks for the answers and info!
Inky: Yeah, i dont doubt that they could know what 8chan was beforehand, just to have mentioned that. And even if that was the case, seeing that they got told by others what 8chan was before the AMA started (i think?), the could easily have known before hand regardless. What i find strange is the logic behind announcing something like that, fully knowingly (i would assume) that this wouldnt go well. Theres basically nothing to gain by doing so from what i can see, yet they still go ahead and do it.
Last edited:
Unless it's a full on troll, I would say that it is based on the avatar and name. Disappointing and it's definitely not being blown out of proportion. How can anyone fucking say that.
There is something to gain.
When you get the gamergate folks latched onto your company, they become an online strike force against anyone who criticizes your company. With those folks attached, criticisms of THQ as an entity becomes riskier to make, because doing so means you're likely to have a harassment mob start hounding you for it. They're not much in terms of actual sales, but in terms of your public image, the idea that you have a THQ Online Defense Squad that can kinda look like it's just "passionate fans" is a plus.
This is a part of a pattern. Some group makes some bit of outreach to the hate mob, and in so doing wins a level of loyalty. After having done that, they then make an incredibly insufficient apology. The people they just did outreach to understand the apology, because they think the company has been "forced" into making it, so they don't take the apology as a rebuke. And a lot of people don't want to believe that this sort of malicious behavior was intentional, so an apology that casts the whole thing as a great big misunderstanding puts the incident back into the mental box that they wanted to contain it to, and lets them write off the whole incident. The net result is that the entity has gained themselves an online attack force that will defend the company from criticism without costing them seriously in the eyes of the public.
If you want an old example of it, and of how to escape this box, look at Intel. Leigh Alexander wrote an article for Gamasutra that angered gamergaters, and so they started trying to go after Gamasutra's advertisers. Intel wasn't in the know on what was going on, and they actually acted on these complaints, pulling advertising from Gamasutra. They had to turn around an issue an apology for that behavior, which wasn't as good as you'd hope (but still not as awful as THQ) and was taken by gamergaters as the sort of "forced" apology that I mentioned above. But Intel didn't stop at the apology, and like two months later announced a big diversity initiative, part of which was doing a partnership with Feminist Frequency. It wasn't until that happened that gaters realized that, no, the apology Intel made earlier wasn't "forced", it was genuine, and that Intel wasn't slyly on their side. Which isn't to say that Intel was suddenly back on the side of angels because they donated some money and did a strategic partnership, but it at least burned away all of the good will they'd engendered with a hate mob with their original action. You can't recover from a situation like this without that at the minimum.
Last edited:
The problem is that just leaving it "it's a bad look" is very inadequite for the level of offense here. Like, this is really literally no different from them posting "Heil Hitler" on their twitter account. That was even said by a user at the very damn top of the AMA. They failed to even mention the CEO's response to the whole thing.
And why is 80% of the discussion always taken up the pointless hypothetical where they just didn't know. There's an absolute ton of evidence they did know and them simply selecting the website isn't even the end of the problem here, but what they said in it as well.
And then, no discussion on what you think should be the response of anyone outside of THQ Nordic since it's been clearly swept under the rug. No discussion of what the hell is the culture of this industry where THQ Nordic thought this was a good idea and basically got away with it.
So, yeah. I agree we don't need them to tell us it's a bad look. If it's going to be left there you might as well not mention it all because that much is obvious. If I were to rank their response to others in the industry, it'd be pretty high up, but that bar seems unfathomably low here, where the only range of responses is completely ignoring, matter of fact mention, or just leaving it at "bad look".
Waypoint and Game Informer are the only two places I haven't felt completely disappointed by. I think Abby on the beast cast was on the right path too, but was a little drowned out from driving the conversation.
Last edited:
I guess what I'm saying is, if someone is listening to them talk about this story, and by the end of it can't determine if they want to give THQN their money for signal-boosting a site full of child porn because they're not sure what the staff at Giant Bomb thinks about it...that's beyond the scope of what the Bomb/Beastcast exists for.
I don't need GB to elaborate on their feelings about it because I trust that A) They think it's ultra fucked and B) I don't need to know they think it's ultra fucked to know that I think it's ultra fucked and I'm not giving THQN a dime.
I understand the need for the media to be more vocal about these kinds of things, but like you said that's where outlets like Waypoint come into play.
I feel like that's an oversimplified way to look at it. It's not like you can reduce it to a metacritic review score of the incident.
Yeah blows my mind that you someone can say it's out of proportion. Like if you don't care fucking whatever, just shot your goddamn mouth. But actively defending this shit speaks very poorly of a person.
This is a pretty minor detail in this whole event, but there was an image posted on the AMA of a guy with a giant iron cross, which accompanied a request to have an anti-ResetEra easter egg in all of THQ Nordic's games. I was curious as to what the significance of this guy was and the image name, visible in the screenshot, seemed to be a name.
So I looked it up, and was confused why I wasn't getting any results. Then it occurred to me. The image was named hans_judenjaeger.jpg. Juden is the plural of Jude, meaning "Jewish person" or "Jewish man". Jaeger or Jäger is a hunter. The image was effectively titled "Johnny Jewhunter".
Not that they were hiding that that they were Nazi sympathizers or that I wasn't expecting to find something horrible, but nice reminder of the type of people THQ was trying to appeal to, anyway. And again, the company is headquartered in Austria, so some of the people running this AMA might have had an easier time catching that than someone learning the language for funsies like me.
So I looked it up, and was confused why I wasn't getting any results. Then it occurred to me. The image was named hans_judenjaeger.jpg. Juden is the plural of Jude, meaning "Jewish person" or "Jewish man". Jaeger or Jäger is a hunter. The image was effectively titled "Johnny Jewhunter".
Not that they were hiding that that they were Nazi sympathizers or that I wasn't expecting to find something horrible, but nice reminder of the type of people THQ was trying to appeal to, anyway. And again, the company is headquartered in Austria, so some of the people running this AMA might have had an easier time catching that than someone learning the language for funsies like me.