Developer Giant Spacekat exits PAX East due to threats

Remember when we played games?

The embarrassment caused by a certain faction of the gaming space continues to make things terrible for just about everyone. Because some keyboard warriors refuse to see reason and behave with basic human decency, developer Giant Spacekat is withdrawing from PAX East.

Founder Brianna Wu, who has experienced hell in the wake of GamerGate, said that the threats haven’t stopped or died down. In fact, they seem to be getting worse. The company had this to say in its press release related to the matter:

“GSX has continually attempted to get support from law enforcement with tracking down and apprehending the individuals behind the explicit and detailed death threats. These are regularly sent, targeting Brianna by name and sometimes even with other identifying information.

Despite the credibility of those threats, and despite even the attempted action by one of those threatening individuals to act on those threats recently, very little has been accomplished by law enforcement towards the goal of apprehending these criminals, let alone towards preventing future threats.

As threats have recently come to encompass Brianna’s family, and appear to be escalating, Giant Spacekat has made the decision to prioritize its family, the employees, and their safety. Specifically, we have chosen to withdraw our presence from the Pax East 2015 Expo Hall, due to a concern that in a crowd of such a volume expected at Pax, the safety of our team can not be guaranteed.

Of note, we are in no way trying to imply that the PAX teams have been uncooperative regarding security requests, nor are we trying to imply that PAX is unsafe, or that the admirable efforts of the volunteer Enforcer team would be inadequate. This is a company specific decision, made out of precaution.”

This is sad. Not just for Brianna, her family, and everyone at Giant Spacekat. It’s a sad image of the gaming community that is continually tarnished by a fringe group that just can’t grow the fuck up already.

[Via Twitter]