So maybe some of you have seen the recent ROM hack come out, by the developer of Pokémon Emerald Seaglass, called Pokémon Lazarus. This one has a far larger scale to everything, it's quite clear that it is a massive undertaking for a sole dev, and most of the community is loving it.
Well, some aren't behaving well. There's been some petty, disgusting feedback from a (as ever) vocal minority. Those who are homophobic, bigots, who are mocking design decisions and the sound (which Nemo, the dev, has created from scratch), some who hate seeing a pride flag.
Anyway, Nemo has decided after this bullshit to step back from the public and stop interacting. We've seen this again and again with developers. And it's getting SO damned exhausting:
With that said, I’ll be taking a step back from the community for a bit. I’ll post bug-fixing and new feature patches to the Development Discord server, but I don’t plan on posting anywhere else for a while. If I go on to develop a new project (which I do have planned!), it will likely be in secret until close to release, if I choose to release it at all. With everything going on in my life (Master’s program, work, real world commitments, etc etc), I guess I’m just not prepared to also handle the bad side of attention on the internet.
I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.
In 2013, EA won the Consumerist poll for "Worst Company in America." While mostly people pointed to arguably rational reasons for these votes (DRM, microtransactions, badly made and released games), the COO of EA had some other thoughts as to why they got hammered so hard as the worst company:
When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I'm genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become "mainstream" but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time "this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are." But.... were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we're on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?
Damn, I hate how often I look at a situation like that and just think... what a waste. Some morons came in and ruined the message most of us were trying to send to EA by making them the "Worst Company in America". Now these gross bigots get a "win", and EA gets to sidestep all the legitimate anti-consumer issues most people were railing against. What a waste. And it feels like that's everything these days, someone gross is always "on your side" looking to claim your victories for their own narratives.
I still have my doubts that was the majority of the issue, at least the first time they "won" that award in 2012. That poll happened 1 month after Mass Effect 3's release, when emotions were still raw over people's disappointment with the game's ending. That's not to defend those who were voting for EA over, say, Nestle or any number of other awful companies. But most of what I saw was immature lashing out to punish anyone perceived as responsible for the writing. I remember people cheering they'd managed to harass EA's tech support Twitter account into closing, like they'd made some great moral victory. It was all pretty gross, just for different reasons than EA claimed.
I'm not saying it was a majority issue, I'm saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.