Possibly you are correct, but theres also the possibility this will draw more attention to the game and the company, and more people will buy here for exactly the reasons why some people will stop buying.
Maybe the math will be in GOGs favor, at least thats what i hope, but theres no way to know.

I think you missed my point. If people were actual GoG customers, they'd know there are no Cyberpunk 2077 pre-orders yet....

lol timely response, i was googling to see if there were any cyberpunk 2077 preorders, and i got conflicting results, thank you for sparing me the effort to dig further

Yeah, polygon literally has articles about how men in gaming is toxic. I thought they were the ones that said gaming has a white male problem too, but I might have been thinking of a different site. There are even articles there about how being a 'gamer' is a dirty word. A bizarre article for a 'gaming' website, I think all can agree. It's perfect for an activist website, though. That sort of thing is widespread, game journalists are even claiming that gamers are sexist because they don't want to play games on mobile phones, as one recent example.

Games journalists are no friends of the gaming industry. It's a strange phenomenon that it's so widespread, my only guess is whatever education they need to go through to become game journalists is filling their heads with propaganda nonsense. It could also be the only way they can get enough clicks to stay active, posting propaganda pieces to build outrage and thus traffic. Either way they're a real problem for keeping politics out of games in a general sense. The sort of people who go to polygon for articles are the same ones that would try to get linko fired, and I'd say it's unlikely they were ever going to buy a game anyway despite their comments.

Well, yes, I don't think we'll agree, either. As a biz owner I'm of the notion that the last two tweets shouldn't have happened at all and thus provided no reason for anyone to get hot and bothered in the first place (and then no need for 'milquetoast apologies'), whereas it sounds like you're fine with those marketing moves and that the problems lie with the reactions of other people.

What you're labeling as my hindsight, I can't agree. It wouldn't occur to me in the first place to make those particular marketing moves, because I have the foresight to not even start to go in a similar direction with my company's efforts. I'm baffled, frankly, that any experienced paid professional would think those were a good idea. But look, there were earlier instances from which to learn the lessons, yet the two later tweets came about anyway. That isn't hindsight looking at it. That's wondering why someone didn't figure this out after having to deal with the earlier difficulties, regardless of who was right or wrong, who was offended, blah blah blah.

Yes, POSTAL 2. As mentioned before, there are literally hours upon hours of game content to use. That this particular snippet was chosen is not an accident, regardless of who made the .gif, and it was poor foresight not to see that there was going to be a bad response. That it targeted the media that the store relies on - in part - for its PR... this was not a good business decision at all. You mention yet again in a later post that it's a non-offensive tweet, but all you can really vouch is that it's not offensive to YOU. You and I don't get to decide what offends / bothers others. They do.

As for the last tweet: even if nobody had been upset by it, I still have to question why in the world this particular marketing effort featured a hashtag taking the reader to a place that A) is focused on a bit of a hot button in today's society, and B) has absolutely nothing to do with games. They couldn't come up with something useful, maybe start their own 'tag like #keepyourgames, that would actually talk about an advantage to the store having DRM-free titles?

Instead, someone deemed it a good marketing move to take the reader to a socio-political place with bupkis relationship to the store or the games it sells.

----

Now, don't start thinking folks in the thread are happy someone left the company. But given that earlier negative social media reactions had provided warnings to the company twice before, it's quite clear to some of us why that decision was made.

Put another way: if I was paying an outside firm for PR and this was their idea of marketing my company and its products and services, I'd drop them like a hot potato for putting me in that position.

I have another question - why in the world "transgender rights" activists used so general hashtag in the first place? They could easily make something more unique, like #gendermatters or #genderisachoice, especially if they are so concerned about keeping everyone else away from "their" hashtags.

Hasn't GOG shown on multiple occasions that it suffers from social retardation?

So I think it has to be asked if GOG knows the difference between good marketing and bad marketing. And if the people making the hiring decisions don't know that, why *are* they making the hiring decisions?

To you only the results count and if the results are bad, you are just going to sack someone. I get it, you are just one of those kinds of people. I'm just glad I don't work for someone like you where the heads will roll over any problem.

The fact the circumstances don't matter to you just shows you are the sort of manager that cares nothing for those "lesser folk" below you. It doesn't matter than these other flaps were over nothing such as the one over the PC Master Race group. Nope, that's negative publicity to you and that is always bad. Doesn't matter that your employee got doxxed and harassed by the outrage mob. In your uncaring opinion, he deserved what he got. Yet, PCMR is a group, focused on PC gaming enthusiasts which should be a valuable asset in growing the company. But hey, GoG did the right thing in your opinion by throwing them under the bus and backing down to the mob over an opinionated outrage mob that weren't buying your games anyway because they have already declared your company sexist for the Witcher series because of "sex cards", lack of a female protagonist, and that women aren't always the good guys and can be harmed because some self-proclaimed cultural critic put CDPR on her hitlist years ago. Not to mention the lack of diversity because they think Poland is a backward country led by fascists. And if you think I'm joking about this, maybe you should read the posts on the forum that sent the outrage mob or look at some of the tweets of that cultural critic with respect to Poland or Japan and her opinion about their cultures. These are not GoG's customers. They've spewed bile in GoG's general direction for years.

But hey, let's fire your employees over it and demoralize the existing staff. What a wonderful move. I don't think you really understand the arrogance of some of these West Coast Americans. They already look down upon the rest of the country, but when it comes to 2nd world nations like Poland, Russia or Japan with backwards non-progressive cultures in their opinions, their arrogance just grows. GoG is never going to win these people over. I'm sure they thought opening an office in America might help, but I'm sure those sent over here already found out the hard way.

The Polygon's and Kotaku's and VG247's of this world are not the gaming journalists any game developer should care about. They are just here to create controversy so people see what crazy dumb stuff they write next which grants them ad views and thus revenue. They gave up the concept of objective game reviews year's ago. You can't win with them. If there is a controversy that can be spun, they will do it. Just as they did with Witcher 3 reviews at first praising the game before going on a diatribe about how racist and misogynistic the game is. I'm sure their readers ended up with such a good impression of the game, don't you? These magazines are the one's cultivating the outrage for their own benefits (ad revenue) and it's not going to stop no matter what GoG does. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out, you will see the same thing again. They will praise the gameplay (if it good) and then give a backhand slap exposing all the non-gameplay related cultural deficiencies for the rest of the review to appease their rabid outrage-prone fan base. Mark my words...

Judging from the throne breaker advertising on this site I’d say GoG doesn’t know much about good marketing. Even their FCKDRM thing seems like the worst kind of marketing from 90s gaming when everyone thought only 13 year old boys played games.

With a well selected gif / image then they would not have had a reason for it, and come across as dorks. with the gif that gOg had, they provided that reason, and instead lost the moral high ground and gace the "SJW's" the ammunition they needed. a PR person who does his job well would make sure the first happens, not the latter. When you are dealing with something which can be volatile, tact is important. I see no reason why you should give the opposition well founded reasons instead of no reasons.

In other words, GOG wouldn't have to bow to SJW mob, if GOG's PR-manager had bowed to SJW mob first.

That poor boy is gonna give himself an aneurysm with all that hatred built up inside of him.

Thank you for taking the time to respond articulately here. You're right, I probably did confuse things by pointing out two different variables at once.

As far as you pointing out the stat on hate speech from the same study, that is irrelevant to our current discussion, unless you are attempting to say that Linko90 did something that meets the definition of hate speech?

"Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity" -Wikipedia

If you do think re-tweeting an innocuous hashtag in a different context is hate speech and thus a fireable offense, then you're probably in the 7% of people who strongly disagree that political correctness has gone too far.

Again, thank you for taking the time to respond articulately here. Like I said before, you're right, I probably did confuse things by pointing out two different variables at once (although as they both tended to support each other, I didn't think weakened the overall point to the degree you implied it did) but your idea that the "source data itself is a tad dubious...and the stats they show here result from a very clunky methodology" is simply not substantiated by anything else you've written here, as you haven't given a specific critique of their research design other then your opinion that some questions used "loaded terms." In truth, everyone knows exactly what political correctness means and everything they published used a statistical model with a 95% Confidence Interval, as you can check for yourself in the appendix.

Your suggestion that: "A person who'd consider a given tweet to be problematic ("hate speech") would be called oppressively "politically correct" by the tweet's aother, and yet would be statistically likely to denounce "political correctness" themself." is rather counter-inuative to suggest that people who consider innocous tweets to be ffensive hate speech are not politically correct themselves - no one is confusing political correctness, we all know what that means -- you are instead confusing "hate speech" with "speech that politcally correct people disagree with."

And even if one does mostly agree with you and say that 99% of the study was not well-constructed, it's very hard to argue with these two statistical findings:

-80% of 8,000 people said "agree" when asked this question "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Political correctness is a problem in our country."

-And on the flip-side, only 7% of those same 8,000 people strongly disagree with the claim that "political correctness has gone too far" in a survey section on free speech.

Let's apply this statisical significant information to Linko90's situation by answering a few questions:

1) Was Linko90 fired because of saying something "politically incorrect": YES

2) Was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of the people who strongly agree that "political correctness is a problem in our country." :NO

3) Was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of those who strongly disagree with this statement: "political correctness has gone too far": YES

4) Therefore, was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of a vocal minority of GOG's customers?: YES

5) Do the majority of GOG's customers disagree with Linko90's firering? YES

That has been my main point from the start. The sort of people who argued here and elsewhere for Linko90 to be fired organized campaigns and use institutional power to focus their relatively weak strength against one target at a time and this has a chilling effect on the 80% of people who disagree with them and their tactics.

Think of it this way: if you're at a party with 40 people and 3 people are walking around shouting that 32 people should leave the party or only be allowed to stay if they agreed with them on changing the music to Yanni and replacing the beer with zima, you would not take these people's suggestion seriously. You would politely ask them to leave the party and when they didn't, you would warn others to ignore them because, well, (to use a colloquial term) they're a-holes.

In response to your statement that: "I don't believe in good faith in internet gaming forums (that is, in actual intentions of "communicating", "discussing", "understanding", etc). These exchanges tend to be pure "everything goes" attempts at "scoring points" with no regard for intellectual honesty. And I loathe this. So, expect general contempt from my side."

I suggest you set your sights higher. Maybe that's how some others do things here, but that's not me. I've seen lots of places on the internet were excellent exchanges of information take place and people's minds are changed (sometimes even my own). And I won't change to be like your low expectations, instead I will continue to be the change that I want to see.

"The real issue is that GoG did something they view as political (it's not),"
Opinion without any supporting evidence.

"that goes against what "real gamers" want (it's not)"
An opinion that goes against researched presented in this forum conducted by some of the UK's leading leftist academics.

"that's only catering to an outrage mob (it's not)"
Again, an opinion that goes against evidence presented in this forum.

"and that GoG should do what they want them to because them buying games here gives them the right to decide how GoG should run their business (it doesn't)."
Strawman and disproven as per the basics of capitalism and consumerism, see Adam Smith's "on the Wealth of Nations" for more information.

Honestly, I am relatively new here but widely read. I realize that this story is big on many of the same gaming websites that launched their "gamers are dead" articles (just read about that last week... wow, that's seriously not indicative to you that there was an ideological infiltration and coordination in gaming journalism? I mean, serious, you think everyone just thought they'd write the same article at the same time?).

But I suspect that there is a reason why you present no evidence for your suggestion that this outrage at linko90'S tweet is happening out there among average people, not just progressive activists and allied gaming journalists - the reason is that there is no outrage among the vast majority of the people out there. I couldn't find a single article on a platform not run by progressive activists. Google news shows the top coverage by: "Kotaku, Eurogamer.net, Polygon, The Daily Dot" - hardly objective neutral sources.

That is often the case with manufactured outrage - it is very difficult to grow organically as it is not compelling.

You know, compelling like a man being deprived of his livelihood by a terrorizing mob for doing nothing wrong...
Yep, about 7% of the population - the same 7% that I am suggesting we ignore to reduce their infulence back down to their real 7% share of the population.