Reaps: I'm not active on the forums, but I've been a member of GoG for a long time. This thread was worth chipping a post into, even if it's just a glorified "+1"
"Gamers" in general have had a long and proud history of standing up to moral busybodies trying to meddle in their hobby, no matter what political or religious stripe they're from.
The last few years in particular have been fascinating to watch as newer, more perfidious threats appear in an attempt to strongarm what
should be a pastime into yet another tool with which to shape culture to their own liking. The odd thing is that, despite how successful people within the community have been at seeing off this threat, game companies
themselves still tremble in fear of them.
So with all this said, stop behaving in such a silly fashion, GoG. I refuse to believe you're this spineless. If this is about a fear of losing money over some faux moral outrage, then perhaps it's
also worth considering how much money you'd lose from purchases that
might have otherwise been made by actual members of your community whom feel disgusted with your kowtowing to the faux moral outrage
GoG is a company, they don't care about anything but making money, they have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to not care about anything but making money. As such, GoG should be avoiding these issues altogether and not making dumb jokes to begin with because that keeps all sides happy and maximizes their potential to sell to as many people as possible.
The fact that people read this as some kind of personal insult or an insult to gamer culture is kind of reading too much into what actually happened.
The simple fact of the matter is that your social media manager is supposed to maximize your brand potential, and if Linko was the person whose job it was to be social media manager than he did something incredibly stupid by posting jokes that could be considered controversial and from a brand management perspective posting an apology was the correct course of action. This isn't the first time GoG has been called out for this exact issue, so to me that says Linko was pretty bad at his job if he was the social media manager. Any company would fire a person in that position if they continued to post that kind of content after multiple issues.
I should stress, it has nothing to do with the validity of the outrage about the posts,
I think the outrage was not warranted whatsoever, it has to do with the fact that a good social media manager is supposed to be able to recognize these things and avoid them. I think Linko was pretty good community manager in this forum, but he obviously wasn't cut out for managing their social media.
I should also add I don't think he should be fired, but I do think he shouldn't be managing their social media.