Gearbox's CEO Randy Pitchford took time during his keynote speech at the Develop conference in Brighton to talk about gamers and their vocal nature. Pitchford used the hullabaloo around Aliens: Colonial Marines to set the stage for for the speech.
If you missed out on the fiasco that was/is Aliens: Colonial Marines, it was game that fell relatively flat upon release. A lawsuit has been launched against Gearbox (the game's developer) for using "misleading footage" in advertising. Ultimately, the game won Gearbox the backlash from thousands of fans that had bought the game based on advertisements.
Pitchford's talk at Develop focused on how some people are mean, just for the sake of being mean.
“If you’re making entertainment on a grand scale, if you’re reaching millions, there will be tens of thousands of people who absolutely hate us, and some percentage of those will take it upon themselves to let us known how they feel,” said Pitchford.
“I read it in this way: we moved those people, we touched them – even the person who hates [your game] so much, you’ve affected them. That’s why we fight, we’re creating emotion and experience – and some people thrive on that type of feeling, some people are sadists.”
“There is always the person who’s got to stand on the sandcastle, they must crush it,” he said. “That’s their way of relating to that. It’s typically a less sophisticated mind. There’s a dark part of us all that likes the idea of crushing a sandcastle, but most of us will respect it and let it be. That’s why we like playing video games where we can blow stuff up and no one gets hurt.”
What Pitchford is saying is true, to an extent. There are people who are going to put down a game simply to put it down, but Aliens: Colonial Marines is not the game to build that case on. There's a reason why there was a backlash from the community and that reason is why he is in a lawsuit.
The community upheaval wasn't just because people wanted to crush his sandcastle, saying that completely removes the fact that the product that was advertised was not the product they released.
