That's not what they were talking about and you know it.
Nobody here is defending child porn. I think what they're saying is that consumers of THQN games will only be affected by this PR mess if they choose to be- if they choose to boycott. The Epic exclusivity thing affects the entire audience of a given game, not just people who choose to be affected by it.
Perhaps if the only counter-example was the Epic-exclusive game controversy, but the whole thing is irrelevant and beside the point anyway since it's not. None of the random people who lost their minds over it were actually affected by Jessica Price's comments either. Yet the GooberGoblin types lost their utter minds over it and ArenaNet acquiesced like the very next day, it took them practically no time at all to react to that. People let themselves be "affected" when it came to the ArenaNet firings and immediately demanded the firing of Price for daring to say rude things to a fan of the game with a personal account, but they suddenly can't muster the same energy when it comes to hosting an AMA on a site that's blacklisted by Google and hosts child porn and all kinds of other terrible content and the like?
When considering past controversies like the ArenaNet controversy, not a single bit of that holds up to scrutiny. If people can begin to make themselves care, even begin to make themselves care about what Price said on Twitter, and demand AreaNet take action, they can certainly muster the same energy for the THQ Nordic employees involved in this whole mess. That they do not, and everyone suddenly seems content with an apology of all things, a luxury they never so much as for a moment considered giving to Price and the others fired, suggests nothing good about the industry. And that that's all the case, that that all went down the way it did in comparison of this, makes me skeptical that the only difference between the Epic exclusivity thing and this is just that one thing personally effects them and the other doesn't either. People certainly made Price's words their business regardless of whether it affected them or not, just as they also did for individuals like say Alisson Rapp (the Nintendo Treehouse employee who was fired for haivng a moonlighting job on the side, which was certainly nobody's business and affected no one in any way, but they sure as fuck made it their business until Nintendo fired her), so why the sudden lack of caring and sudden inability to make it one's business in the same way?
Like, fuck in Rapp's case all she did was break Nintendo Treehouse's policies, and the only reason people even figured that out is because they essentially doxxed the hell out of her. But in any case that should have just been between her and Nintendo, and it certainly didn't concern anyone else. But the people wanting her fired just hid behind the whole "oh, but she did break Treehouse's and Nintendo's policies, so she has to be fired, and that's just how it is, blame them, not me" nonsense.
So why is the same furor not here? Why does it only tend to show up in certain incidents and not others? Unfortunately, when you look at which ones it pops up and which one it doesn't, it's not terribly hard to figure out and it say nothing good about the gaming industry about which incidents lead to action being taken and which ones lead to none, who the gaming industry seems to listen to when they're demanding immediate firings, and who they ignore.
And so yeah, even by someone bothered by it myself and anything but a fan of Epic in this regard, I'm going to be pretty damn skeptical when it comes to the Epic stuff and someone cares passionately about the Epic stuff and suddenly backs off of something like this, just because one "affects" them and the other doesn't and am not inclined to believe that for a second. But it's beside the point anyway because those other controversies exist and make it pretty clear there's more to it than that regardless, and nothing that paints a good picture, unfortunately.
