what alternative course of action do you suggest instead? I don't understand why you think people should continue to be surprised by wholly predictable reactions contingent upon inherently flawed human behavior.
hopefully your solution isn't simple moral posturing that Things Should Be Better, because that might feel good to say but as a solution it's pretty obviously untenable.
regardless: either Ron Gilbert is, somehow—even after DeathSpank(!)—hopelessly naïve with regards to the state of anonymous shit-flinging on the Internet in 2022, or all of this moralizing and othering of Toxic Entitled Gamers (which we've definitely never seen deployed before!) is part of the PR plan for this game, to make people feel sympathy/empathy for a celebrated, legendary game designer being forced to read mean words on the Internet about something he made, as though this is some great moral travesty of our times and not just the baseline level of Internet interaction one should expect by now. again: why is any of this a huge surprise to anyone involved? why is Ron Gilbert taking any of this personally instead of just taking the tack of "lol well this is what I wanted to make so fuck off if you don't like it"?
either way, sad state of affairs, especially given that I'm looking forward to the game's release regardless. hopefully the lesson everyone learns from this is that people act like fuckwads on the Internet and there really isn't anything you can do about it aside from refraining from looking at it... which is a lesson I thought we all learned a long time ago.
presumably the last time he made a game people weren't such huge dicks about it... no big deal but modern gamers cause a chilling effect in the industry by behaving this way, inevitably. Creative professionals /don't/ have to get used to being punching bags.. they're exactly the type to take their toys and go home. That's what happens when you do something for love (and take a pay cut to do it).
The hateful gamers will just have to continue to enjoy loveless games made by companies who know that a 100mm budget is table stakes to protect them from their customers. The passionate makers will find something else to love; that's their power.
the current top comment in this comments section is also decrying the Entitled, Toxic Gamers that are the cause of all that is Bad and Wrong in the world of video games today—have you ever noticed how convenient of a recurring boogeyman this is?
"gamers are the worst, they suck and are terrible. no, not you, of course—you're not a gamer, you're a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, just like me, the writer of this Kotaku article. you and I are different from these vile and horrible "gamers", who aren't being misogynist or racist today but you just know any day now they'll be back to doing that too. how we hate them! now anyway, the latest vile act that these abject villains have done is make Ron Gilbert sad by writing mean words about an unreleased video game based upon trailer footage, on the Internet. imagine! being mean to Ron Gilbert, celebrated adventure game designer! the nerve of these gamers. how we hate them! now, Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, what do you think about the art style of Return to Monkey Island? do you love it? answer carefully, because the only people who don't love it are those people we hate, those untermenschen 'gamers'! now answer: how great is Return to Monkey Island's art style?"
don't you find the rise of this kind of rhetoric over the past 15 years or so, and all of the moralizing it entails, to be at the very least curious? "othering" a broad, diverse population of people by strawmanning them as though they were a political party or something, generalizing based upon anonymous Internet comments, an eternal beast of a boogeyman who is always lurking in the shadows just out of sight, only to emerge in the public consciousness now and again as the driving force of moral outrage that you should definitely feel very strongly about, because as we all know there is no greater evil in the world than typing mean words into an Internet-connected text field and clicking "Submit", right? and it always seems to happen whenever somebody wants their personal and/or game's profile to be raised, whenever it sure would be nice for all involved if more sympathetic Cultured Video Game Enjoyers would point more of their eyeballs at the person and/or product being promoted, on grounds of moralizing against the uncultured gamer swine, and above all, proving that you're not one of them.
idk for me after 15 years of this shit it's pretty old by now and that kind of appeal-to-emotion persuasion doesn't faze me in the slightest anymore. some people said some mean words on the Internet to a guy who's going to release a video game later this year, and it made the guy sad. that's a bummer, but I just can't bring myself to get worked up in the way the Video Game Journalism Industry wants me to—I'm kind of done being emotionally manipulated by everyone in that sphere. I don't need to "identify as" either a "gamer" or a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer to enjoy video games, so it's not hard to reject the attempted pseudo-political cultural bifurcation here by rejecting the whole dichotomy and saying "lol video games amirite"—and I recommend others do the same!
I dunno why you think demanding that people can't feel hurt on the internet is any less overbearing than condemning people who are mean on the internet.
I'm not sure where I issued such a demand, but, it should be obvious that it is easier to learn to deal with the existence of negative Internet shitposting than it is to try to morally posture it into nonexistence, despite the latter feeling good.
You're confusing disgust with surprise. One can predict abuse and also not enjoy it and decide to close the comments down after you get too much of it.
