Some of BioWare’s employees used the death of YouTuber, John “TotalBiscuit” Bain, to castigate him for supporting #GamerGate and wanting better ethics in media journalism. The publicly made comments essentially meant to disgrace and defame the YouTuber’s legacy as some of BioWare’s staff decided to proclaim TotalBiscuit as an enabler of harassment and misogyny. They did so without any proof, and stepped into libelous territory. Casey Hudson publicly reproached one of the employees but stayed silent with the other.
The lackadaisical approach that BioWare took to chastising its staff for glorifying the death of a cancer patient was a bit much for certain gamers to handle, resulting in some people stating that they were dismissing any interest in BioWare’s upcoming game Anthem and swearing off the company for good. One of those individuals happens to be Daniel Hardcastle, a prominent YouTuber who runs the channel NerdCubed (or Nerd³), which has more than 2.6 million subscribers.
On May 26th, 2018, Hardcastle tweeted out that following the events of BioWare’s staff denigrating TotalBiscuit in screeds following his passing, he would no longer be covering BioWare’s games in the future.
Due to the recent actions of @bioware employees every Bioware video has been removed from the channel and I won’t be covering them in the future.
— Daniel Hardcastle (@DanNerdCubed) May 26, 2018
For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, one of the programmers for Mass Effect: Andromeda had a lengthy diatribe that was posted online following TotalBiscuit’s death, while another BioWare employee – an artist working on Anthem – also chimed in to defame the late YouTuber.
Casey Hudson only addressed the comments made by David Crooks, the programmer for Mass Effect: Andromeda, while Anthem’s Mike Jungbluth was forced to post up an apology.
Many gamers within the community were not at all pleased with this turn of events, and aired public disgust toward BioWare for allowing their employees to behave in that manner.
This isn’t even the first time that BioWare employees lashed out at the community. Last year the gameplay designer for Mass Effect: Andromeda, Manveer Heir, went on multiple racist rants but was never condemned, chastised or reprimanded by BioWare’s staff. Instead, at the time, the general managers praised and supported Heir’s racist tirades. Just before the game’s launch, Heir departed BioWare.
Some gamers are wondering if Hardcastle may have changed his stance, since he announced that he was no longer going to cover BioWare’s games on the morning of May 26th, where-as Hudson’s apology came during the afternoon of May 26th. So far, Hardcastle has not changed his stance and I did reach out to him to confirm if he’s staying firm even in the face of Hudson’s apology.
The compounding of repeated politically-charged incidents could be enough to finally put a nail in BioWare’s coffin. It’s obviously not a good look for EA or BioWare heading into E3 in just a couple of weeks.
(Thanks for the news tip Blaughast)
