With the Summer Game Fest behind us, other than a little coverage that we’ll have later this week, we are finally back to normal. However, amidst the trailers and the race to put out showcase coverage, I needed to sit with one of the Summer Game Fest Showcase’s more controversial moments. With a chaotic political climate to say the least, the CEO of 1047 Games, Ian Proulx, performed what I would call a (shockingly successful) political stunt.

Now I want to call myself out for a moment and be transparent about something here. I praised Proulx for making the statement: “I don’t want to play the same Call of Duty every year”, and I stand by that praise. However, what I didn’t realize, because I had been taking notes on the showcase for several hours, is that Proulx walked out on stage wearing a hat that said, “Make FPS Great Again”.

This has led to a (justified) firestorm of criticism and controversy from various camps, some political, some not. I’m not going to get into the politics of it because frankly, that isn’t what we do here. If you’ve followed us long enough, I think our beliefs are obvious, but my issue is more what Proulx said afterward.

In an apology on X titled “No excuses, I’m Sorry” (linked above), he started by stating the reasoning behind the stunt. He explained that it is “really freaking hard, as an Independent studio to break through the noise.” I don’t disagree here; I think that with the number of games that launch weekly, it gets harder for smaller games to break out. What I have an objection to is what he comments on about the hat.

He comments that they needed something to grab attention, and the hat is what they came up with. However, he adds that “We did not intend for this to be taken in any political way whatsoever.” – This is a blatant lie.

Playing devil’s advocate, he might have meant that they didn’t have any meaning about their own political affiliation with the hat, but the hat is an obvious propaganda symbol. No matter what writing is on the hat, that style of “Make [insert topic] Great Again” is an obvious reference to the MAGA hats that became famous during Donald Trump’s first campaign and administration.

To say that they had no intention for it to be taken in any political way is just insulting the intelligence of both sides. The people supporting them and the people who oppose them both recognized the symbolism and (depending on political affiliation) talked about it. It spread like wildfire on Social Media for a variety of reasons. It was poorly timed due to the situation that ensued shortly after in Los Angeles (and is still ongoing at the time of writing), not to mention it detracted from the situation that is ongoing between Israel and Iran, which has led to bombings and loss of life.

As I said. I’m not getting into Phenixx Gaming’s political stance on this. The real point here is that this apology lies in the face of the fans of Proulx’s game and his detractors. Then, he decided to post basically a “YouTuber Apology,” trying to make people believe that it wasn’t a publicity stunt.

The fact is (regardless of your opinion) that the stunt worked. Splitgate 2’s player base skyrocketed in comparison to the beta. Whether the publicity stunt worked or not isn’t really the issue, though. He should have just come out and said, “We wanted to stand out, we figured this would get people talking.” Sure, it makes you look awful, but it is honest.

Sadly, we see this all the time from developers and publishers supporting Pride Month in June, only to seemingly forget that the LGBTQIA+ community exists on July 1^st and beyond, to controversies like Ubisoft’s misconduct or the Activision Blizzard Scandals. People in charge of companies make these apologies with clear evidence to the contrary.

The Gaming Industry has an optics problem. The internet often has a wide array of evidence to showcase that what you are saying in your apology doesn’t match the truth. So, let’s just cut out “the noise” and be honest. Trying to save face might work with a group of people, but eventually, that noise from the publicity stunts and controversies will just get swallowed up by the next thing.

Better yet, if it is so difficult to break through the noise as an Independent studio, why not make efforts to help other studios? Why not work with people to figure out ways to break through that noise that doesn’t insult the intelligence of your user base? All that was done here was to create more noise that wasn’t necessary and put scrutiny on your game and staff.

The industry has a short memory, so next week we will all be focused on something else. Granted, with the chaotic state of the world, that’s a good thing in some cases. There are bigger things to worry about than a CEO scrambling for attention. However, these are teachable moments where we can figure out how to help Indie creators so they don’t have to resort to degrading themselves by doing things like this.

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