The developers of Subverse, one of the most anticipated adult games of all time, thought it would be a great idea to publicise their game via a video with Arch, formerly known as Arch Warhammer, a man who we last saw calling Creative Assembly “cuck beta leftists”.
As The Daily Dot report, developers Studio FOW gave Arch an “exclusive first-look preview” of Subverse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his brand is being the kind of person who makes 22-minute videos about how he’s definitely not racist when a website simply asks him for comment.
After a quick and understandable backlash from the Subverse community over the deal, the game’s community manager issued a statement:
Hello my darlings.
I am going to make this short, because we’ve taken up enough of your time with what has happened recently regarding Arch.
To start, lets keep Subverse as a game for getting off on sex and not politics, it’s best for everyone.
In terms of the previous statement regarding Arch, we were bombarded suddenly with posts from different political groups, and as a result we acted in haste. After all, we are only titty software developers but suddenly we found ourselves in a political debate.
We would like to make it absolutely clear, we have no problems with Arch personally. We simply wanted him to showcase some of our gameplay together, which Arch did professionally and he was very gracious with his time.
We appreciate his time and want to say we are sorry for jumping into a politically charged situation so quickly. Subverse has no political affiliation, it’s a game to be enjoyed by everyone.
We did not want to offend any fans of Arch, he provides a platform for independent games creators like us to showcase our games.
We love all of our fans regardless of political affiliation and we hope in due time you can forgive us for this unfortunate misunderstanding.
Huh, a statement that tries to clear the air but actually makes every single thing it addresses worse. Interesting.
“The Studio was unaware of Arch’s polarizing background going into this collaboration”, the note concludes, which suggests they’re either terrible liars or even more terrible at booking their PR if they don’t know the most obvious things about the folks they’re working with. Whichever it is, terrible!
A game like Subverse, given its bootstrapping origins and subject matter, should be one of the most inclusive places in video games. And yet here they are, signing deals with a guy who makes videos like this:
It’s all very depressing, especially when you consider Studio FOW is the second developer to be called out for this in 2020: