Oh, boy. It’s tense times that we are living in, and it seems that the video game space isn’t free from the odd uncomfortable situation or two. Now, I’m no marketing expert, but it seems like a terrible idea to promote a game by playing on Islamophobic images and memes.
Yesterday the online store known as IndieGala wanted to promote a game in their big winter sale in a most insensitive of ways –Via an Islamophobic tweet. Insurgency is a game that has been around for a little while now and pits two teams of Middle Eastern fighters and Western forces against each other.
The game itself is fine and goes for that “pulled from the headlines approach”, but this controversy isn’t about the game itself, instead it’s about how IndieGala is promoting the game during their sale.
The company posted the following tweet that clearly wasn’t vetted by anyone with a brain:
The above meme was posted on 4chan sometime around 2014 and comes a Steam review that was posted around the same time. It’s a shitty problem that gamers have dealt with for years (It’s why I don’t really play online unless I known the people I’m with), but to have a company with some 500,000 twitter followers post is mind-boggling.
No long after the meme was posted on the official IndieGala twitter and Facebook page the Insurgency team at New World made a very public request to have the tweet removed.
The people at PC Gamer reached out to the team at New World and received the following comments from creative director Andrew Spearin starting that they “had no prior knowledge of IndieGala’s intent to publish an offensive meme and game review to promote Insurgency. When it came to our attention, we immediately requested IndieGala remove the promotions.”
Come on, IndieGala. I know you were going for a tasteless joke, but you’re a company and someone over there should have spoken up about this shitty marketing move.
About Author
