Over the weekend, announced that it would be forcing all players on PC to connect their Steam accounts to PSN accounts. This would have locked out players in countries where PSN isn’t available, which is a lot of countries - over 100, to be exact. Understandably, players were outraged and review bombed the game, which eventually led to PlayStation going back on the decision. All in all, things turned out alright, unless you were a community man𓄧ager for Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead.
A lot of vitriol has been unfairly aimed at Arrowhead for a deci💧sion that was ultimately out of its 🤪hands, with community managers🐲 receiving the brunt of the negativity. Community managers play an important role in mediating between players and studios, doing a lot of the communication from devel♚opers to players and vice versa. In a live service game like Helldivers 2 where things are continually changing and those changes are being reacted to in real time, CMs are even more important as they’re the people that monitor player sentiment and communicate with them through official channels.
When the PSN controversy went down, it was the studio’s communiꦓty managers that had to field messages from players. Despite Arrowhead actively being against the policy of players having to connect to PSN accounts, community managers were cursed out, insulted, and . This is part of a rising trend of active hostility towards employees who act as the faces of game studios, which shouldn’t be happenin🤪g.
What Did Community Managers Actually Do?
I really hate to talk about Mark Kern or the resurgence of Gamergate culture, but for the purposes of this piece, it’s unavoidable. Kern worked at Blizzard in various roles from 1997 to 2005 on games like , , and , later founded his own game studio alongside three other former Blizzard employees, and was removed from his position as CEO by the board of directors after accusatio💦ns of mismanagement and gross overspending.
He now goes by Grummz on Twitter, is the face of the new Gamergate movement, and claims to be the voice of gamers who don’t want activism or ‘wokeness’ in their games. Known primarily for railing against DEI in games and inciting the harassment campaign against Sweet Baby Inc., he has recently turned his attention to community managers and the role they play in interfacing with🦩 both players and developers.
, “The Community Management layer is the worst place for DEI, because it allows acti♓vists to determine who gets banned, what thoughts can be expressed, and they control dev perception of the fanbase… We need fair people in Community Mgt who are not going to warp those reports for their own purposes.”
In order toꦯ facilitate this, he’s been sharing profiles of current and former community managers who don’t live up to his standards, leading to widespread coordinated harassment of these people that often forces them to lock or delete their personal social media profiles. Of course, Kern will then say that these people are “ditching their jobs” for doing so.
As much as Kern says he doesn’t want his followers to harass people, this is what happens, and he’s very aware of the outcome of his actions. He i🌠s actively stoking the idea that community managers who are cognisant of racial, gender-based, and queer issues are political activists who are anti-gamer. He has done multiple thre꧒ads about specific community managers who are pro-diversity and inclusivity, often calling them toxic and even insinuating that liberal CMs are forcing other CMs to conform for fear of cancellation.
I am not linking directly to any of the posts I’m referring to here because I don’t want to bring more unwanted attention to these people who have already been unfairly targeted for having politics more left-leaning than Gamergaters, which is a low b🌺ar. Helldivers 2’s CMs were a꧙lready being targeted for having any political content in their bios at all, but the attention from the PSN controversy has made it all much worse.
Free Speech Doesn’t Apply In Discord Servers
Since Kern’s followers have been responsible for a lot of harassment CMs are facing, he’s understandably a contentious subject in the official Helldivers 2 Discord. Kern has now claimed that the server’s mods and CMs are banning any of his defenders. I’m on the server and a quick search of his Twitter username shows that there are plenty of people sharing h𒈔is tweets on the server and showing support without being banned, so that doesꦉn’t seem to be entirely true.
Even if it was true, it would be warranted. The community managers and mods are entirely within their rights to limit certain topics or words, and that’s something that GGers didn’t seem to have an issue with when discussion about LGBTQ topics was limited in the server. These CMs were hired to do a job, and if the developers had a problem with it, they would deal with it. None of these ‘DEI hires’ snuck into their jobs, they were hired for a reason, and if banning members who encourage harassment against them means they can actually do their jobs of liaising between ♔devs and players better, then that’s what they’ll do.
CMs protecting themselves from unwarranted hate isn’t an infringement on players’ right𒐪s, it’s just self-preservation. It doesn’t make them anti-gamer, it makes them anti-people who tell them to kill themselves. These are real people who have to endure a constant influx from people who think they don’t deserve to have their jobs because they p🃏ut their pronouns and some pride flags in their bios, and while the majority of players are being entirely normal about this and denouncing the harassment against CMs, right-wing agitators constantly highlighting new people to harass are actively making your games worse. Community managers are trying to do their jobs, so for the love of god, just let them.
Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.
