When a video game fails, most of the blame rightfully goes to the dev team and the publisher who made the title or titles, as they were the ones who had the “most hands on the product,” and were the ones to make the terrible decisions that led to the game’s failure. Even if the game actually isn’t that bad, they clearly made the wrong moves to market it to the gaming space and get sales from people. However, for certain titles, such as the ill-fated Mindseye that released earlier this year, the blame also falls onto some of the actors who were in the title, even though it’s not really their fault at all.
One such actor is Alex Hernandez, who was in Mindseye and has been in another video game that had a rather rough launch years back, Mafia 3. When his newest title failed, he told FRVR Podcast that the backlash reached him hard and heavy:
“Video gamers are a unique species, and I’m one of them, where the attachment to the experience and the product is so strong, the feelings are so strong. The internet is an anonymous place where people will share things they would never say to your face, ever. Even if they actually hated it, even if they thought it was a pile of trash, they just wouldn’t look you in the face and be like ‘everyone who worked on this game deserves to die, this is f*cking awful, you people are idiots, how could you have done this’. No one would ever say that to your face.”
He’s not wrong to say that, and sadly, this is easily one of the worst parts about the gaming industry as a whole. While gamers have a right to fire criticism at devs and publishers for how things are handled, it should NEVER result in death threats, misogyny, racism, or any kind of hate speech. Yet, whether it’s gamers blasting gamers or going after the development teams, it happens all the time.
For Hernandez, he admitted that he was actually excited for this game to come out, and then, when the negativity from critics and fans rolled in, he wondered if he’d be able to work in video games again, as he was one of the faces of this game. However, he realized the only way forward…was to keep moving:
“As an artist, as a man, as a gamer, that hurts. It’s like wildly painful. And after about two days of allowing myself to wallow, and my wife being very supportive and very like ‘I get it, this was something you had a lot of fun doing, you were really into, you thought it was going to be great, it looked awesome’, you move on. Because for me to sit in that wallowing, it doesn’t allow me to learn.”
Words to live by.
