Bully Hunters Group Ends after 5 Days

Last week, a group of female gamers known as “Bully Hunters” was created. The organization was created with collaboration from FCB Chicago, a marketing agency.   Their goal was to attack players who harassed women players in Counter Strike: Global Offense. They described themselves as “vigilante hit squad of elite female gamers.” The Bully Hunters would attack harassers of women from the game with their “skills and talent.” Bully Hunters was backed by some high-profile supporters: Twitch streamer ZombiUnicorn, a spokesperson for the campaign, as well as SteelSeries, Vertagear, CyberPowerPC, the Diverse Gaming Coalition, and the National Organization for Women. Their goal was to bring more awareness of online gaming bullying. A noble goal but Bully Hunters had suspicious activities from day one.

Their debut stream showcased footage that was prerecorded, excessive promotion of their sponsor, Steel Series, and a poor statistic showcase of harassment in games.

Many sponsors stopped supporting Bully Hunters after the first stream. They began to disagree and were misled with the methods of how Bully Hunters worked. Natalie “ZombiUnicorn” Casanova was another part of Bully Hunters that was heavily scrutinized. She is a YouTube and Twitch streamer. Many tweets, streamed footage included her using homophobic slurs and using offensive language. They were spread across Twitter and social media websites to discredit her as an appropriate spokesperson. Casanova defended her responses as they were in the past, particularly the stream footage which was 6 years old. She also defended her use of foul languages as they were responses back to online harassment.

After 5 days, Bully Hunter has been disbanded. FCB Chicago announced the disbandment of the organization on April 17th. All videos, websites, and social media pages have been deleted. The Global Chief Communications officer, Brandon Cooke, stated: “As this effort did not live up to our high standards, we decided to end this program, but hope the conversation it has raised around ending harassment in gaming continues.”

Business Perspective:

Everyone can agree that the gaming community can be improved. There are different communities for different games so its impossible to target every gamer. Online competitive gaming communities are notorious for being unwelcoming to women. However, creating a group of women players to attack players was a dangerous tactic that didn’t work. The way Bully Hunters were marketed as a serious, dangerous group of females but ended up being a joke before the end of the day. It makes them too serious without proving their abilities. All talk and no action, especially since the first stream footage was revealed to be fake.

Some trolls can escalate their negative emotions through gaming. “Not only does engaging griefers and trolls validate their negative behavior, it can also backfire and antagonize them, increasing the aggression towards their targets,” said Holly Greene, an assistant editor for Paste Games and has done work on Gamasutra, Polygon, Unwinnable, and other video game news publications.

Sources:

PC Gamer – Bully Hunter Origin

PC Gamer – Bully Hunters Disband

FCB Agency

Steel Series Statement on Bully Hunters

Diverse Gamer drops Sponsorship message

 

Sony puts PlayStation Vita to rest in Spain

This year, Sony announced that PlayStation Plus would not include free PS3 and PS Vita games. Fans criticized the decision because it limited players exposure to potential games they may have missed. It also made players less likely to play their older generation consoles. Recently, a tweet from PlayStation Spain announced they had stopped production of the PlayStation Vita.

Translation: “Hello! It’s actually discontinued, yes.”

While rumors speculated the Sony would stop manufacturing the Vita last year, it seems like Spain is the only region currently that has stopped for the Vita. Whether new Vitas will be manufactured world-wide remains to be seen. The PlayStation 3 stopped production on January 7, 2013 globally. The PlayStation Vita struggled to compete with Nintendo’s 3DS. Now that the Nintendo Switch is out, the Sony handheld looks deader than ever. A lack of third party support, popular game titles, and marketing led to the inevitable failure of the Vita.

What was your favorite PlayStation Vita game?

Sources:

TechSpot

Daily Star UK

Billy Mitchell’s High Scores deleted for Cheating

Billy Mitchell is an infamous video game player known for his record-breaking scores in classic Donkey Kong and his bullying attitude. His greatest achievements are obtaining the highest scores in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. His scores and rivalries are so famous that there’s an actual documentary about it called King of Kongs. Billy Mitchell has been on Guinness Book of World Records several times. Well, it turns out Billy Mitchel was cheating to obtain his high scores and was stripped of his title and banned from Twin Galaxies.

Billy Mitchel – David Greedy via Getty Images

Twin Galaxies is a gaming website and forum dedicated to professional gaming recognition and support. They have a relationship with the Guinness Book of World Records that helps record gaming achievements. Billy had recently broken the world record in Donkey Kong by achieving a score of a 1,062,800-point performance on July 31, 2010. This raised many suspicions from the community. Jeremy Young, a prominent member of the Donkey Kong Forum, accused Billy of achieving his high score on an emulated version of Donkey Kong rather than a legitimate arcade board. It was noticed after a frame by frame analysis of the footage that Billy sent in was displaying an incorrect sequence in the level transitions that never occurs on an arcade board.

Frame by frame analysis of the footage from Billy Mitchel

Usually, a member from Twin Galaxies must be physically present to view an attempt at breaking a world record but new management had changed. Twin Galaxies accepted the footage from Billy as proof of his achievement.

For his gaming crime, all of his high scores have been removed from records in Twin Galaxies and Donkey Kong Forum. This also includes his record-breaking score in Pac-Mana – a score of 3,333,360, the maximum before Pac-Man reaches its “kill screen” and becomes unplayable. His player page on Twin Galaxies is now blank.

With his score removed, the new world record holder is Steve Weibe who was Billy’s rival shown in the King of Kongs documentary in 2007. Steve is now the first world record breaker million-point scorer in Donkey Kong history and is recognized by Twin Galaxies. Twin Galaxies’ statement is below regarding their ruling.

With this ruling Twin Galaxies can no longer recognize Billy Mitchell as the 1st million point Donkey Kong record holder. According to our findings, Steve Wiebe would be the official 1st million point record holder.

Sources:

Polygon

Twin Galaxies

Twin Galaxy’s Statement against Billy Mitchell

Donkey Kong Forum 

Donkey Kong Breakdown

Square-Enix opens Luminous Productions and their future

Square-Enix recently announced they will be announcing a new studio called Luminous Productions. The head is Hajime Tabata, the director of Final Fantasy XV. Most of the team are from the Final Fantasy XV developers. Their vision: “Luminous Productions was established with the purpose of developing new AAA titles and bringing innovative game and other entertainment content to a global audience.” Besides Final Fantasy XV, Tabata has also worked on many of the Final Fantasy VII spin-offs including Crisis Core and Final Fantasy Type-0.

While FF XV has received a mixed reception from hardcore JRPG and Final Fantasy fans, the game’s sales were critical to saving the series and Tabata’s goal to continuously improve the game is admirable.

Square-Enix is no longer a gaming juggernaut since early 2000’s. They have had less success in game releases as the gaming industry grew. In the mid 2000’s, there were less unique IP titles from SE and more focus on Final Fantasy spin-offs. None of them sold well except for Bravely Default. When Yosuke Matsuda took over SE, he noticed the decline in overall quality and had Square refocus their efforts on diversifying their portfolio. They developed three new studios, Square-Enix Collective, Tokyo RPG Factory, Studio Isoltila. Each have different focuses such as helping develop new indie games or old franchises of SE, create new classic style JRPG’s and Studio Isolita has the director of the Tales RPG series leading the development of a new game. Matsuda has also allowed studios to work on new projects such as the upcoming Avengers game by the Tomb Raider team and sold the Hitman studio after he believed SE wasn’t the right publisher.

While SE has been slow on development and game released, under Matsuda, they have achieved a profit of 257 billion yen last year. Luminous Productions plans to work on a new IP outside of the Final Fantasy series. With Tabata running his own studio, perhaps we will see a big new series.

Sources

Square-Enix

The Verge – FFXV saves FF series from ending

Gamesindustry Biz – Matusda helps SE grow

Square-Enix’s profit margins in 2017