Kotaku Writer Receiving Death Threats over ‘No Man’s Sky’ Delay

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When games get pushed back, it is easy to get upset over not being able to play the game you were looking forward to and now have to wait even longer to play it. But threatening someones life over that is something else entirely.

Kotaku writer Jason Schreler comments on receiving death threats after publishing a story about the game being delayed and they were the first ones to report on the mater before this news was official.

Here is his comment about the subject:
“Don’t worry: I’m fine. I’ve never felt like this dude was actually going to come after me, and working at Kotaku forces you to develop a pretty thick skin. When you write about video games, you get used to trolls and threats. This can’t even compare to some of the harassment faced by outspoken women like Sarkeesian, especially on Twitter. The social network is crucial to the careers of critics and reporters who use it to spread word of their work, develop sources, and communicate with readers, but it is pathetic at dealing with harassers. I reported @BeachClasherMDR for these threats four days ago; as of Tuesday morning, Twitter has yet to do a thing.
One line in that message is particularly revealing: “It’s the only thing I live for.” Whether or not he was exaggerating, that’s the type of obsession that fuels so much of the nastiness in gaming culture. There are plenty of great gaming communities and, in my experience, most gamers are perfectly pleasant, but too many are unable to separate themselves from their products. Video game fans who are zealously attached to their favorite games—even, as in this case, a game that has yet to come out!—are prone to get aggressive when they feel like they’re being attacked. Or when they get bad news.
As soon as I broke news of the game’s delay on Wednesday night, I watched the No Man’s Sky subreddit explode, filling up with messages about how it couldn’t be true, how Kotaku must be trying to troll them, how we’re always wrong. The subreddit’s overworked moderators were quick to clean up many of these threads, but for the next two days it was bedlam. People tried to dig up reasons the delay couldn’t have been real—“Kotaku’s sources are anonymous, so it can’t be true”-and even came up with elaborate schemes to harass GameStop employees across the country.
One redditor, Gilchrist78, declared that he’d called 30 GameStops and confirmed with them all that the news was false. “NMS is NOT delayed,” he wrote. When I commented that I was confident there was indeed a delay and that people really shouldn’t get their hopes up, he doubled down. “So you have 1 source in Gamestop,” he wrote. “I have 30.
It is a shame that gaming culture can spark such hurtful comments, but the writer is safe and that is good to hear.
Source: Kotaku and NeoGaf

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