Thread by @squidlord

You mean a man who was LITERALLY acquitted after a very public trial and a fair amount of footage depicting him being attacked, violently, physically, and defending himself? #censorship #gaming #kylerittenhouse #Fanatical

https://twitter.com/Fanatical/status/1551967298235269120

1/13

I didn't realize that Fanatical was so overtly against the rule of law in the US. 2/13

> At Fanatical we never want to offend our loyal and important customers and as a reaction to the feedback, we have taken immediate action to pull the content from the bundle. 3/13

But offending other people by literally censoring content, making it not available, is perfectly okay. That's quite all right.

Part of why this is so insulting is that apparently the game was good enough to make it into the bundle in the first place. 4/13

One assumes they do due diligence when it comes to game quality for such things.

So it's not like they are apologizing for pushing substandard content or a game that they didn't think was good enough to be played by an audience. 5/13

It's not like they're adding a game to the bundle so that people who don't want to play Acquitted, for whatever reason, receive equal value. 6/13

Instead they pull the whole bundle because a handful of people – and I refuse to believe that it's more than a handful – stomp their feet and cry about not wanting to play one of the games in it that they aren't being forced to in the first place. 7/13

And as a result Fanatical is complicit in going out of their way to make sure that no one else can, either. 8/13

Fanatical doesn't believe that you, as a consumer, are smart or trustworthy enough to make decisions about the games that you play and how you feel about them. They will tell you how you should feel.

Sensible people would think that was a bad idea. 9/13

Sensible people would trust the audience. Sensible people realize that the people who are complaining aren't really their audience. 10/13

Fanatical has decided that it doesn't matter if a jury of your peers finds you not guilty, literally innocent, of the crimes you have been accused of. Doesn't matter to them.

All that matters is whether the right people whine and cry. 11/13

For everyone else, they'll just tell you that it's for your own good. In their estimation. No, your opinion doesn't matter here. 12/13

Nothing about this is a good sign for the videogame industry which has already had some significant problems for 100 reasons, not the least of which is an increasingly Puritanical/authoritarian streak a mile wide.

This will not end well. 13/13