Persisting technical issues and a lackluster game loop have resulted in harsh criticism of Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds. The game currently has an Overwhelmingly Negative rating on Steam based on 20,000 player reviews from the past month, and its official social media channels are swamped with players’ demands for fixes. However, the criticism has escalated beyond the game itself in certain instances, with developers reportedly being personally attacked and threatened. The issue seems to be particularly severe in Japanese online spaces, as the topic has even earned coverage from major national newspapers like The Sankei Shimbun.
Earlier this month, Capcom issued a statement regarding its Anti-Customer Harassment Policy (only in Japanese, notably), in which it said its employees have been faced with harassment, threats of harm and threats of business disruptions. Furthermore, some of these instances were supposedly directed at individuals personally, addressing developers by name. Capcom warned it would be taking legal action in cases when criticism goes “beyond the scope of socially acceptable standards.” Although the company did not state so directly, the warning was, based on the timing, likely related to the controversy surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds.
A few days following this announcement, Capcom also cancelled a CEDEC lecture during which its engineers were supposed to hold a presentation about Wilds’ optimization, which may have been done as a safety precaution. Reporting on the worsening phenomenon of harassment in the game industry, the Sankei Shimbun notes, “Die, “Get on your knees,” “Incompetent scum” – these are just some of the many words of abuse hurled online toward specific creators behind Monster Hunter Wilds.” Although this kind of crude language is nothing new to gamers, it is increasingly becoming targeted at individuals working in game companies – on a personal level, which makes the issue a lot more serious.
The Sankei talked to Hideki Yasuda, a game industry analyst at Toyo Securities, who commented, “It’s always been common for some fans to lash out when a game’s quality doesn’t meet expectations. But in recent years, companies have increasingly put individual creators in the spotlight as a means of marketing, which has turned them into public targets.” Yasuda goes on to note that with how widespread social media has come to be, society now demands the same level of moral conduct online as it does in real life, but “when it comes to gaming, user awareness hasn’t quite kept up with this shift.”
Meanwhile, there has been an increasing tendency among Japanese game companies to publish policies against customer harassment, with some recent instances being Square Enix, Sega, and Level-5. Among them, Sega even publicly announced that it had taken legal action against an individual who continuously made “excessive defamatory and insulting remarks” about an employee. It might be important to note that in Japan, the memory of the Kyoto Animation arson attack – which took the lives of 36 people – is still fresh in the memories of creatives, and it serves as a very stark reminder of how much harm a seemingly random online threat can lead to.
