FooTwork

For the most part, when it comes to staying in touch with the fans, Alex Rodberg is among the goodest of the good guys. He has acquitted himself with grace and good humor. His online monniker, Marweas, is a contraction for "marketing weasel". And has anyone in PR ever earned a love letter like this one from the Tribes community, a notoriously obnoxious group of hard-to-please fans?

Sierra has always had a fan-friendly PR department, with stand-up guys like Adam Kahn and Rodberg taking their lumps, justified or otherwise. Rodberg belongs in the ranks of producers like Ubi Soft/SSI alum Carl Norman, Atari's Constantine Hantzopoulos, Fox Interactive's Dave Stalker, and developers like Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds, Sony's Raph Koster, and Jane's CJ Martin, all guys who remind us that a lot of the industry is just gamers who managed to make a job from their hobby. We all speak a common language. We all wasted hours with Diablo 2, we all still have Half-Life on our hard drives, and we all have an opinion about whether Myst is evil. We all like talking about games; we might as well all talk about them with each other.

But flight simmers might remember how this all took a nasty turn about five years ago when Origin's Andy Hollis, flush with the glow of almost universal adoration for Longbow 2, was relentlessly hounded by some idiot on Usenet who called himself "FooT". Do a search on Google Groups and the results aren't pretty. This was the beginning of the end.

The whole episode on the Relic forums isn't surprising (although it is mystifying that Rodberg was as put out as he was). These sorts of 'screw you guys, I'm outta here!' posts from developers, producers, and PR folks aren't uncommon. But what's even more common is that these posts don't happen. Most industry guys will just quietly shake their head and slip away, maybe going into lurk mode but more likely just being done with the whole noisy thing. As a result, there's an increasing divide between the people who make the games and the people who play them. And guess whose fault it is? It's yours, not theirs.