• THQ Nordic CEO apologizes for the 8chan AMA
    56 replies, posted
I'm sure they do. I think they just make up a smaller part of THQ's overall audience. Nope, I don't get how are you misreading me I don't think there's going to be much data on this sort of thing because internet forums I think are still weird niche hobbies for most people. same goes for Facepunch/SomethingAwful/ResetEra/whatever else. I don't profess to be doing anything more than speculating.
It was definitely the right move to make from a general PR perspective, but it won't do anything to change the opinions of the people who were crying about it in the first place. To these people, THQ Nordic will now always be associated with "hate speech" and "pedophilia," and no amount of groveling at their feet will change that. These people will just sit and wait for the next fuck up, and proudly proceed to tear them apart while bringing this whole mess up again. THQ Nordic has a wide audience that is only getting wider as they acquire more and more IPs. As such, on a gaming focused board, I don't see how at least some of their customers wouldn't post on 8chan, just as some of them probably post on 4chan and Reddit. Though, if we're talking really broad like you're claiming here, most of them probably post more on Twitter and Facebook than 8chan, 4chan, or even Reddit. By that definition, it would make more sense to do an AMA on Twitter (which would be a fucking nightmare) as that's where you'd get most of your audience. You'd probably be more correct if this was regarding a developer who generally makes games with themes of those that clash with your average 8chan poster doing an AMA on 8chan.
Considering most people who go on the chans /v/ boards are people that have been playing games for yeeeaarrrs, and love to harken back to ye olden days of gaming, and considering how old THQ is, I would think that their audience is more likely to overlap with them even more.
I guess I don't see how THQ Nordic makes games that resonate with 8chan users in particular.
Why? What games do you think that they enjoy? Even if there are a lot of awful people there, I gonna assume that they enjoy the same kind of games as we.
All the more reason that THQ shouldn't double down?
tbh AA-games which is what THQ Nordic are publishing are far more popular with gamers that would go to sites such as 8chan or 4chan or even facepunch. AAA games would be far more seen on bigger websites like Facebook or Twitter. people who put more time into gaming as a hobby would seek themselves to AA games far more often than your usual person who plays the occasional AAA game each year, and eventually a person into AA or even A games seek other communities to hang out in.
kinda wild how people don't see why this was a bad move that genuinely needed an apology like, say what you want about freedom of speech, but 8ch hosts a lot of content that is widely considered to be objectionable and hosting an AMA there could be seen as a sort of silent endorsement of the content hosted on the site. THQ Nordic is a publishing company that works with game studios all around the world and a lot of those game studios didn't particularly care for their parent company associating with a website that was openly advertising the site's "trap shota" board on the same page as the AMA this isn't about appeasing the feelings of the overly-sensitive, this is about perfectly reasonable people concerned for their livelihoods. a man working in Public Relations, whose one job is to Relate to the Public, either forgot that being associated with illegal pornography and white supremacy is a bad thing or lacked the foresight to google 8chan before hosting an AMA there. either way he utterly failed at his job as a PR official and put hundreds of people's jobs at risk by tanking the company's reputation. Imagine you work for one of the many studios under the THQ Nordic umbrella. You're already nervous about your job because you work in video games where layoffs are extremely common and unions are practically nonexistent. Not only that, but you work for THQ Nordic, a company wearing the skin and assuming the identity of a different company that went under. Your job security is not high. Now imagine being an employee of THQ Nordic this past week where all you can think is "oh god i hope this greasy basement dweller didn't fuck up the company's rep bad enough to where investors start pulling funding and layoffs start having to happen." an apology was totally warranted and absolutely necessary for THQ Nordic to continue to exist. if it didn't happen, investors and studios would start jumping ship and THQ Nordic would start crumbling because of a series of dumb internet posts. this is the route that leads to the least amount of people losing their jobs and anyone who thinks that their feelings regarding their legal right to say the n-word online are more important than people's livelihoods i just dunno what to tell you. the sentiment "they shouldn't need to apologize" isn't far off-base, though. they shouldn't need to apologize because they shouldn't have made these mistakes to begin with. but the mistakes were made and apologies have to be half-heartedly shit out to cover the tracks of one dumbass that couldn't do the one thing his job asked him to do
Reddit also hosts a lot of objectionable content but nobody says something about their AMAs. If we put on the shoes of a corporate, yeah, THQ make a dumb decision of making an AMA on 8chan, probably they ignored that people gonna crucify them by doing that. Maybe whoever made the decision was too naive. But if we remove the glasses, then is understable that THQ wanted to meet their fans, no matter where are they, and how other people mentioned, maybe a lot of them are on 4chan/8chan. Hell, I even say that is unfair that they can't complete the AMA on peace and losing the opportunity to talk with developers.
The problem is that people feel like posting on 8chan automatically means you endorse all of 8chan, just like posting on reddit doesn't mean I endorse the alt-right.
Anyone can make a board on 8chan, theres no unified theme on it. As people have said it's like reddit with lots of self moderated boards. Reddit has it's own dodgy subreddits, no reason why this is any different. Just people freaking out because they saw the word chan and made the mental jump to /pol/ without knowing what they're talking about.
Any chan board is going to be a chan board, especially a main one like /v/, so at the bare minimum, you're going a lot of extra shitposting to sift through.
Reddit AMA's are more commonly accepted than 4chan or 8chan AMAs because the number of clicks it takes to get from "socially acceptable" to "socially unacceptable" is higher. A brand new user to Reddit can continue to use reddit happily without realizing that the website even has seedier corners. You have to be looking for it to find it. On 4chan you're never more than a couple of clicks away from something vile, but if you're selective of what boards you visit you can trick yourself in to thinking the site ain't so bad. On 8chan, the board the AMA was posted on contained a direct link to one of the site's shotacon porn boards. One's a worse look than the other two.
I mean even if there are shitposters, literally what difference does it make. It's not like they posted anything offensive themselves. They did a fun thing for shits and giggles which would have been totally harmless if the eternal whinge bags hadn't come out to ruin it for everyone.
Weird, I remember that places like "/the_donald" were only some clicks away on Reddit. Also you have a "Search" function on top of the website that can throw you to all sort of places when you search something. "if you're selective of what boards you visit you can trick yourself in to thinking the site ain't so bad" can be said to Reddit too.
THQ Nordic owns the Painkiller series (Oldschool Duke Nukem/Serious Sam horde shooter goodness), as noted before may be the best shot anyone has at reviving the Timsplitters franchise, and published Vermintide (Which can be summarized as Warhammer mashed up with Left 4 Dead). Amusingly enough, 8chan was also pushing suuuuper hard for getting the old Nickelodeon franchise games onto something like Steam. Apparently Battle for Bikini Bottom is a killer app.
i don't know how much clearer i can make it than "one website has a link to shotacon porn at the top of the page while the other two do not" dude. not my fault you don't get it.
I am not trying to be clever, sorry if my crappy English gives you that idea. The Loli/shota discussion is big enough show by the 3 archived threads that we have, so I don't gonna derail this one with that. The sub /the_donald is not as innocent as "Trump supporters", they have a bad reputation for some nasty stuff they have said/done in the past and they are/were pretty big on Reddit, that's why I made the comparison. I "get it", I simply disagree with what was said.
I don't mean to reduce what r/the_donald is, but I still stand by my point as well. Reddit and 4chan make a concerted effort to hide their bullshit while 8chan revels in it at the administrative level to the point where they advertise it at the top of the site with side-wide announcements. basically what i'm doing is explaining the difference between kicking your dirty laundry under the bed and going out in public in a shirt covered in nut. one is simply a worse look than the other and i don't understand why this is even up for debate.
its not like reddit is unaware and innocent with that lol /r/the_donald is such a large part of the site that they would frequently be on the front page and are only not there because the admins made several algorithm changes specifically to stop it. They're fully aware it's there and were even frequently caught editing people's posts there to shift narratives. All of that instead of outright deleting it. 8ch does delete illegal content under US law and DMCA, and the very front of it advises you to leave if adult/offensive content is illegal where you are
I thought that was because they made bots to upvote themselves to the front
No, because that's never been true, the illusion of such is just a side effect of nostalgia and rose tinted glasses. Every company HAS to care how much they are making relative to their expenses, love and passion for game development doesn't feed your family or pay the rent.
My site good your site bad.
I think the key problem some of us ITT are facing is that, since basically all of us are from the Something Awful & Newgrounds & Ye Olde 4channe era of the internet, we're substantially more inoculated against shitposting and more willing to recognize trolls for what they are. Games journalists and social media rockstars AREN'T. They see some single-post randy pull off a drive-by "FUCK YE NEGROES AND BURN YE HARLOTS" thread, and they see people casually using slurs without even thinking of the meaning that word had to them half a decade ago, and they conclude that this is the sole state of things on that site. I mean, they're not wrong, but it's hard to explain chan culture to someone who just started using non-social network internet media in the 2010s.
dunno how you took me saying "all three are equally shit but one doesn't pretend as hard as the other two" as an endorsement of anything but ok
I don't think apologizing has made a difference. If you look at the dozens of articles about it they still seem to attack THQ for their actions. I may be wrong but I don't think the media has gone any lighter on them because they apologized, if anything it is them admitting their guilt to them.
There's nothing wrong with taking issue with what goes on in chans, but that's as far as you should go (unless we go into illegal shit territory), ruining people's lives over things just because you don't like them doesn't sit well with me.
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