While I don’t think that being an asshole about something is a reasonable response, I find it a very understandable response, especially about subjects like this. Regardless of how “turn the other cheek” I happen to be personally, the issues surrounding video game marketing are pretty large, and this sort of cycle of selling a product that doesn’t match its marketed features and level of polish happens far more than it should.

The only thing I feel bad about when it comes to agreeing with your outlook is that there totally are developers who technically work for the parent company receiving toxicity, but had nothing to do with deciding how polished the game could be at release, what top level features the game could receive, or how the game could be marketed, but still end up receiving toxicity for the state of the game because they still are the devs, and if you go down the path of “getting out of the game” when it comes to those people, they may not have ever known it would end up that way when they took the job, or they may need that job to survive.

That grey area is the one part that gives me pause, and it’s the reason I think companies at large pull that card, because you can never prove that the public isn’t hurting innocents, and even though you could look at a case like this, establish that you can’t see any toxicity or death threats in forums, and decide that the company is lying about toxicity existing at all, they may have deleted those posts, continuing to muddy the waters.

It’s just a fucked up situation all round and there’s no black and white answer to it, for me. I think being a manager at my job has hard taught me that sinking to someone’s level when it comes to emotional response is absolutely never a good idea, and that’s bled out to other areas of my life, but I can understand your outlook and agree to disagree on how we’d react to this situation individually.