Personally I still find it fucking stupid that they did the AMA at all and want nothing to do with their games because of it, at least not until they do something like 3D Realms and stand up and donate to anti-abuse/anti-hate causes and whatnot to atone for what they did. But the thing that makes even me realize that unfortunately people won't take this seriously outside of here is just some stuff I saw from the aftermath and onwards.
When it originally happened, a lot of my friends didn't even know it was a bad thing as they never heard of the website before. To them it was like "4Chan but edgy" so the creepier and vile implications weren't as obvious and thus they didn't take it seriously. Some of my friends outright called me paranoid because I pointed out how pretty freaking terrible THQ posting on that site was and it wasn't like they went on a much less offensive site like iFunny for meme purposes and called it a day. I think if it happened a few months later when more people learned about the awfulness of the site from other events, they would have as mad as I was since of the awareness and how the site's now shut down because of just how terrible it is.
It doesn't help that this site's reputation made some people in a discord I was in not even believe the AMA even happened as they didn't want to believe anyone who used this site, so they just thought it was overly exaggerated. Of course when news sites reported on it later a few of them did go "oh shit this is really bad", but when the half-hearted apology came out a while later almost all of them, friends and non-friends basically were like "OK they owned up, that's your first strike so I'm cool with it"
And that's the thing. To others the AMA was a first strike. Not another event in a long list of bad events and there wasn't any inside report that exposed any more bad info about the company or why they did it to begin with, (which I was hoping someone would talk to the press about so we know why the fuck they'd think nobody would be mad at them for it, but I guess they keep stuff tight lipped there unfortunately.) nor something that has been followed up on with something else that was equally terrible.
Thus since they've done absolutely everything they could to never mention or do anything close to that again, those people just forgot/dismissed it as no big deal. The fact that this website's the only major place I know of that speaks up about it still (Alongside some good people like Irman and Frank Cifaldi on twitter) is another sign of that, and honestly that's pretty sad as an abuse victim myself to see that incident acted like no big deal or like another meme. (Nothing that happened to me went online thank god, but I really feel pain thinking of anyone who did have that happen and had that shit end up on the vile site, which is why a post someone made a while ago in the first thread really resonated with me)
In fact, let's go back to the meme bit. You wanna know how many people on my feed were meming up the "Shoutouts to Mark" bit? More than I anticipated, and they pretty much used that as a reason to not take the situation seriously or think it was a big deal because "lol funny oopsie". Pretty darn annoying and I still see some people on Twitter use the AMA as a meme to this day. Along with that are the usual detractors who don't take stuff on this site seriously at all and have thus made things here a meme, such as literally everything ban-worthy that people posted on the first two pages of this very thread and the copypasta that has been in every thread related to THQ so far. (which even I find annoying, not gonna lie) Again, pretty sad and I think that along with the lack of any new updates as to why/how this happened is what led this to being buried. You bet that if a major news site broke the story about the behind the scenes of this AMA or something along those lines the general public would take this more seriously as it's no joke.
In the end though, THQN isn't some game developer who we can easily avoid or a small scale publisher, they're one of the biggest game companies in all of europe. They're also a huge publisher which means the awful people who did the AMA aren't the ones developing the games they actually release. Heck, if what Irman mentioned when this first came out is true, said developers were equally as pissed that their publisher did something so stupid, so it's not like every single employee at the company or their dev partners are in agreement with the policies of that website. It's just when THQ is as big as they are, you can't really split and do your own thing in protest... Which really sucks.
Black Forest Games made my favorite indie games of the mid 2010s with Giana Sisters and now that they're bought by THQ, it'll be a lot more sucky to try and support them, since I'm flipping a two-sided coin with half of each side corrupted, meaning that even if I buy whatever they cook up next I'll support the same publisher who thought an AMA was a good idea. Heck, as people in this thread have pointed out, they do have legitimately good quality games coming out in the next year, from developers with no involvement with this actual shitshow. ...But since their publisher is so bad, I can't really feel safe supporting them unless they're serious about not doing that again. Of course it would be easy if they'd just respond to people like Irman who've asked them dozens of times why they did that, but since they're continuing to ignore any press who ask questions on that I don't think the tone will change anytime soon. And thus, the public won't really be bothered either. Not because they agree with the website THQ had the AMA on (god no, at least most sane people), but because they either aren't aware of it or think that they've brushed it aside and have changed their ways.
TLDR: Unless a partner exposes the whole behind the scenes or unless they do something like this again, the general consumer base will assume that all's well and it was an honest mistake, even though it was clearly not. That's pretty much my final take on this and while I'll be avoiding games from them for the near future, (as much as I looked forward to Biomutant before this went down) I'm still not going to think every single dev they acquired are doing work for the devil or agree with the awful policies of that site, as I'm pretty positive nobody behind Darksiders and Spongebob think that AMA was the best thing in history. In fact, they probably were just as mad if not moreso than we are. I'll just hope that they actually crack down and take action instead of hoping for it to blow over, but I'm also not going to get angry at Best Buy for stocking their newest game.
