Reducing pesky fan noise

Tom Chick on The Firing Line:

The yawn heard round the Internet

The European Computer Technology Show is the European version of E3. By European version, I mean smaller and less relevant, like foreign films or Euro-Disney. So it should come as no surprise that Vivendi Universal Games wasn't showing Homeworld 2, which went gold last week and will heave into stores sometime around the middle of the month.

However, some fellow who calls himself twitchtastic was pretty appalled. He said as much on the forum hosted by the game's developer, Relic Entertainment. His post was followed by a relatively tame discussion about how games are marketed. The reasoning seemed to be that Homeworld is a niche RTS that doesn't qualify for a full court marketing press, so Vivendi focused on their other games at ECTS. But then Homeworld's brand manager, veteran PR guy Alex Rodberg, took time out from his Labor Day weekend to chime in.

Rodberg opened with that time honored passive/aggressive tactic, the yawn, and then wrote a sort of drama queen screed announcing he was fed up, he would no longer participate in the forums, and they never loved him anyway. I might be misremembering that last part, but the tone was there. There was a long string of replies and new threads, many of which were locked by the moderator. The responses ranged from level-headed comments to throwaway remarks like this nugget of wisdom from WarHampster911, who seems to be worried that his punctuation isn't coming across: "Sierra sucks ass. PERIOD."

Since the Homeworld community is pretty small, the whole tempest is a teapot would have quickly died out had it not been mentioned on Blue's News, where ECTS apparently wasn't generating enough press to occlude an isolated PR hissy fit. The most newsworthy thing about this silly ruckus is that an industry veteran like Rodberg, who's weathered far worse, got his dander up on such a relatively friendly forum. Those Homeworld guys are pushovers. It's not like they have much choice in the matter. What are they gonna do, go play Star Trek: Armada 2 instead?