Fez Creator: "Gamers are the Worst ****ing People"

This made me chuckle is disbelief...

Taken from VentureBeat.com:

Note: The following article features some uncensored vulgarities.

Phil Fish of developer Polytron Corporation took away the grand prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival. Winning the big event at the Game Developers Conference earned him $30,000 to help complete his long-awaited platfomer Fez, currently expected to hit Xbox Live Arcade later this year. However, that’s not what got him most of his headlines this week.

Speaking on a March 6 GDC panel promoting the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, in which he’s featured alongside Braid creator Jonathan Blow and other independent game-makers, Fish fielded a question from a Japanese member of the audience, ID’d by IT Media and Kotaku as a programmer and designer named Makoto Goto. Goto asked Fish his opinion of contemporary Japanese games, and he got it.

“Your games just suck,” said Fish, who went on to criticize the modern Japanese games industry in detail. Develop magazine reports that his remarks “sparked an audible reaction” and considerable comment afterward. Goto himself apparently didn’t get the gist of Fish’s feelings until the rest of the audience began to respond, which put the point across.

On Twitter, Fish added , “im sorry japanese guy! i was a bit rough, but your country’s games are fucking terrible nowadays.”

Once the panel concluded, Fish’s remarks quickly began burning up web forums and Twitter. At the moment, a thread on the NeoGAF forum runs to 54 pages, featuring accusations of everything from bad taste to outright racism. Several commenters had uncharitable things to say about Canadians (Fish is from Quebec).

Fish returned fire through his own Twitter feed. On March 8, he announced , “people telling me they’re going to pirate my game because they dont like me. gamers are the worst fucking people.” He also got personal with a few of his critics:

Source:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/10/fez-creator-gamers-are-the-worst-fing-people/

NeoGaf:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=465642

http://www.develop-online.net/news/40061/GDC-Japanese-dev-mocked-your-games-suck?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+developmag%2Fifbh+%28Develop%29

I don't think he was being racist as some are claiming, but his comments are certainly disrespectfully put across, and make him not worth listening too in my eyes. It's the tone, nothing more. I've been a lover of Japanese games for more than 20 years, which is why I have to agree in part with some of his sentiments. There are a whole lot of Japanese games that really suck in comparison right now, that's the truth of it. The Japanese industry is in a stagnant mess, and it's been like this for a number of years now, and for a number of different reasons. Even their own dig the knife in: inafune-san, Itagaki-san, Mikami-san, Suda-san...

What a fool, a prestigious award, major a cash prize, numerous potential publishers and employers in the audience...

Kind of unproffessional, even if there is some truth about the state of Japanese game development.

But eh, i'll just sit back and enjoy the mud slinging.

Yea, I like the media circus this industry often generates, it's good fun Sometimes it can push in progression in various areas, so I wouldn't say it's all bad.

edit: lol, what a fool.

All of this reminds me of what the Bit Trip makers said about a few Capcom franchises recently, while on a live on a UStream Q&A, they were shockingly disrespectful, I was thinking to myself, who the fuck do these guys think they are. Some of these dudes, really get up their own arses, it really is quite shocking, while on the flip-side there are others, that are ridiculously modest. I had the pleasure of interviewing Joakim Sandberg IGF winner 2008: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/linkyshinks/my-interview-with-joakim-sandberg-igf-2008-finalist/30-8287/

(The game is now coming to WiiWare)

He didn't need to get noticed, his work on the game brought him all the attention he needed, and he was successful. I think some of these guys think they need to be brash in order to get noticed, it's almost like they're trying to be the next David Jaffe or something, so the big studios take notice of them. I doubt it works.

( Edited 12.03.2012 17:32 by Linkyshinks )

mister-Linkyshinks, I have to say I understand mister-Fish in some way since he was being completely honest with his opinion. mister-Fish might have not said it at the best moment, in a business sense. I'm not sure mister-Fish cares about that more than voicing his opinion there though. I don't think you can say all games from a country suck, surely there are good and bad games from every country. Maybe mister-Fish was a bit drunk or tired, but it doesn't say so in your post. I wish mister-Fish all the best with his games though, I don't think the right reaction is to be angry at him.
I'm also not sure if gamers will have much of an effect on his games popularity if they are going to pirate it. Maybe this tells us something about gamers in some way, and maybe it could prove mister-Fish point about the apparent sucking of gamers, albeit not in the sense mister-Fish is thinking of I don't think.

I'm well aware of what Japanese game franchise suck and don't suck, I didn't say anything in my post that attempts to tarnish the whole industry there.

Good games continue to flow out, but those are few are far between these days. The quality level hasn't dropped, it's moved higher, because of the industry in the West. Japan makes few advances in technology (they are only now beginning to see the merits of UE3!) and innovating in genres where they should be. Few Japanese companies have a finger on the pulse of what the global market wants, many of them continue to make games with the native market in mind first and foremost, and they pay the price heavily, as recent figures show:

http://www.capcom-unity.com/ask_capcom/go/thread/view/7371/28928829/?pg=last

Dear mister-Linkyshinks, I think there has been a misunderstanding with my English. I did not mean to say you said that games sucked. The you in the sentence "I don't think you can say all games from a country suck, surely there are good and bad games from every country" was referring to mister-Fish. Maybe I should have used the word 'one'. Thank you for your time mister-Linkyshinks.

I'd prefer modesty and letting your work doing the talking if the work is good people will recognise it.

Does the unreal dev kit provide japanese support? I mean this gen we seen a lot of uptake in using licensed engines and middle ware with Epic seemingly taking the lions share.
Maybe that has somthing to do with it? I mean the only japanese engine I know of is MTframework but they don't license that out.

It seems every Japanese developer works on their own engine, Square enix took YEARS making their one for Final Fantasy XIII and in the end they made 2 games with it so far and then announced they were scrapping it and making another one :/

Dunno about Nintendo, though they had the privlage of being able to continue using their last gen stuff, but it will be interesting seing how they adapt going with WiiU.

Also alot of Japanese game development switched to portables, so maybe alot more Japanese console games are being relagated to B and C tier dev teams, kind of a reversal of whats going on in the West?

( Edited 12.03.2012 22:28 by Mr James2t3 )

But Fez's are cool...

Oops, wrong thread.

Yeah, what he said did seem out of line, he is right in some ways to say that Japanese game development isn't as good as it used to be, but to say all Japanese games suck, that's very questionable.

Sounds like an arrogant douchecunt, to me. I hope his game fails. Also, I had never considered the point about engine which James2t3 makes. It's a great point. I think Western developers have got a technological advantage in that there's lots of Western engines they can license if they don't want to build their own. Games development these days is all about "time = money" and maximising efficiency in the development process.