It kind of gets me that people are up in arms over video games being called a factor in mass shootings in America and yet utterly silent in this, to the point that THQ Nordic's tactic of just ignoring the issue and hoping that gamers don't care has proven to be entirely successful.
Now, video games are being used as a scapegoat for the legitimate causes for mass shooting in the US.
America's lax gun laws resulting it a ridiculous amount of guns being out in the wild is the obvious point. But it's not the only factor.
Misogyny is a common factor among mass shooters.
White supremacy is on the rise, and
terrorists from the right are the most common kind.
But pointing at the real culprits instead of video games doesn't necessarily mean that you're concerned with the real culprits, and it doesn't mean that you're going to continue to act against them once the heat is off video games.
This THQ Nordic AMA was directed at a community that hosts so much of that. Not just Neo-Nazi communities, but it was also one of the major hubs of Gamergate, gaming's own misogynistic hate group. Forget firing - THQ Nordic could do anything concrete to show that they had made a mistake and that these people shouldn't be treated as normal. They could set out a plan on how they're going to prevent this from happening gain. But instead they relied on the idea that gamers don't care about these issues and nothing would be done.
And, well, can you blame them? It worked. Nothing was done. It seems like by and at large, gamers don't care. The only time they rise up is when their hobby seems to be under the attack, and it just happens to coincidentally look like they care about gun violence when that causes them to brush up against the topic.
In fact, we have people in this thread who are acting like it's ridiculous that this topic is still brought up even after an explosion of mass shooters related to 8chan. Not just passive apathy, but actively aiding the effort to let THQ Nordic pretend that nothing happened. Just as so many people like to say they're fighting racism but suddenly become incredibly reluctant to actually do anything when the racists aren't explicitly labeling themselves like Nazis and the KKK, you've got people who are insisting that they oppose pedophilia and white supremacy but refuse to do anything about their supporters until they're actually putting a gun in someone's hand and
telling them to get a high score.