Respawn Entertainment has come under fire recently for going after their community for not liking some of the changes in the recent update to Apex Legends. Their uncouth behavior didn’t quite go over so well with the local community, though.
As reported in a Medium piece by Benjamin Wareing, Respawn Entertainment’s project lead, Drew “dko5” McCoy, took aim at the community following pushback after he updated the community about the Iron Crown event in Apex Legends back on August 16th, 2019.
In a follow-up comment, McCoy addressed the anger that the community expressed over the high cost of entry to acquire the new axe, which – according to YouTuber Yongyea – would cost you a total of $170 to obtain it. McCoy wrote…
“We’ve said it before, but we will not engage with temper tantrums, and personal attacks or virtriolic threads are completely unacceptable. We took a look in the mirror this week (lol – thanks for all the attacks guys) and decided we hadn’t met up obligations and are making changes because we believe in our approach.
“I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when players weren’t complete ass-hats to developers and it was pretty neat. I forged a bunch of long lasting relationships from back then. Would be awesome to get back there, and not engaging with toxic people or asking “how high” when a mob screams “jump” is hopefully a start.”
McCoy’s indignant response did not go over well with the Reddit community, who promptly downvoted his comment by the thousands.
Others like diddlyumpcious4 avoided the snark and got right to the heart of the matter, passionately writing…
“You are selling virtual items for 3 times the cost of an entire full price game and push gambling as hard as you can on kids. Everything about how apex packs work is calculated to be as addicting as possible and it absolutely preys on kids and addicts. How does that not get to you more? How can any decent human being look at that and not feel gross? I understand the communities reaction has been terrible but take a step back and look at what you are doing. There’s no doubt you are ruining lives with this gambling you push so hard. And you can honestly sit here and call us asshats for getting mad about it?
“I’m not saying some of what the community does is justified and I know it’s gonna suck to go through it. But you just seem so out of touch from what you are doing.”
User daviss2 also had some harsh but brutally honest words for McCoy, wherein he stated that the developers were being greedy and that it’s no surprise gamers are reacting in the way that they are given that feel like everyone in the AAA business is trying to rip them off.
The harsh language set off McCoy, who responded with the following comment…
“Hey everyone – found the dick I was talking about. Guess what, I didn’t even read your comment except for the first sentence and last. This kind of garbage doesn’t warrant a reply – but lucky for you I already made a comment about this earlier. Go find it.”
In a separate comment, McCoy tried to further defend Respawn’s decision for using the business model that they do, claiming that both Titanfall games were huge and that if they really wanted to chase 200 million players and sell even more expensive cash shop gear, they could.
Hilariously enough the very first reply is to a Tech Times article reporting that Titanfall 2 failed to meet sales expectations at launch.
Further down the thread there’s a link to a Polygon article pointing out that streamers get paid to open loot boxes, as revealed via the Federal Trade Commission panel on loot boxes and microtransactions.
And that’s also not to mention that Electronic Arts paid millions of dollars to have streamers play Apex Legends on launch day just to put it on the map… but even with all of that money they still couldn’t get Apex Legends‘ revenue on the incline.
Having a frustrated developer enter into a thread and berate people for not liking the corporate grift is not the best way to compensate for the failing franchise. Worse yet, the commenters are all calling out the misinformation and providing facts in place of McCoy’s attempt to paint a very different picture than what Apex Legends’ reality actually is.
I doubt this blow up will do anything to help the flailing free-to-play shooter do anything other than sink lower than where it already is.
(Thanks for the news tip VenturousGamer)
