An unusual email hit my inbox earlier today. It was from PR for the makers of Splitgate 2, a free-to-play portal shooter that released just a few days ago and stirred up drama with a MAGA-infused meme at Summer Game Fest from studio head Ian Proulx. “The CEO of 1047 Games has issued a video statement and apology to the community and gaming fans for his ‘Make FPS Great Again’ hat during Summer Games Fest,” the email read. It offered interviews.
To me that screamed “please ask us about our controversy,” in part because in his “apology video,” Proulx admitted the original hat stunt was all about trying to grab attention for his recently-launched multiplayer shooter. “At our biggest stage, coming out of beta, we needed something to grab attention, and the honest truth is we tried to think of something, and this is what we came up with,” he said in his latest video, which arrived just four days after he initially declared “I’m not here to apologize.”
He maintained that the hat was not intended to be political, despite it riffing on the political slogan of an administration currently sending marines to squash protests by citizens in the streets of Los Angeles. Proulx said he also still technically stands by the “intent” of the hat, and his apology for it is not because of the message it conveyed to some viewers but because the controversy around it has led to division in the Splitgate 2 community, some of whom have been arguing about it in comments and Steam reviews ever since.
“We did not intend for this to be taken in any political way whatsoever,” he said. “And I’m not an idiot, like obviously I knew there would be some level of controversy, but we really saw this as a meme that was sort of stating our truth, which is we do want to improve this genre, we are disappointed with the state of the genre, and so we took it as a meme we thought would not be nearly negatively received as the way it was.”
The new video appeared just a day after another one where Pourlx apologized for an $80 cosmetic bundle in the game that players spent the weekend dunking on. He said it “slipped through the cracks” after blaming it on a former head of monetization from Call of Duty who left 1047 earlier this year. Splitgate 2 has reached a few million players since launch, though many are still waiting on a ranked mode. What’s the over/under on how many more videos Pourlx puts out before they get it?
.