BORDA BORDA EVEN comments that Monster Hunter Wilds Capcom received from Japanese fans, which recently drew attention not only from the Japanese media of games Sankei ShibunMain mainstream newspaper. However, Monster Hunter Wilds is just the tip of the iceberg. Dangerous comments, especially attacking individual developers and employees of the company, have become a growing problem for the Japanese game industry, while many vast companies have developed specific rules regarding the harassment of customers over the past few years.
In the article Sankei Hidki Yasuda, an experienced analyst of the Games industry at Toyo Securities, he considered this topic. He noticed that although there have always been dissatisfied players, who in recent years of companies gathered advertising on the creators themselves, turning people into goals. It is obvious that the abolishing of social media and (erroneous) belief that what you say on the Internet is anonymous, also plays a role in this growth of aggressive comments.
However, game companies have arranged to remind people that threatening individual online can have very real legal consequences. On July 4, Capcom created Official advertisement In relation to “the funds of our company against harassment of customers (slander, defamation, etc.)”, which establishes guidelines for dealing with customer threats. Published on his Japanese website, Capcom said that although he values opinions, requests and comments on games and services, confirmed various threats and personal attacks on their employees, sometimes specific people.
Capcom pointed out that such activities are the risk of “a safe work environment and mental and physical health of all involved employees, potentially causing inconvenience and problems for other clients.” In his policy, Capcom stated that he can refuse to offer support or services to clients whose activities “exceed the scope of socially acceptable standards”, and can also take further funds, including legal and criminal proceedings, against malicious criminals.
Until now, this specific policy of harassment of the client from Capcom was issued only in Japanese; The company’s global sites and social media did not announce such an advertisement. This suggests that this policy is directly addressed to slanderous and threatening comments in Japanese, and time suggests that it was made in response to molestation related to Monster Hunter Wilds. Capcom recently canceled a lecture on performance corrections by Monster Hunter Wilds developers, which will take place on July 24 at the annual Japanese Cedec (conference of computer entertainment programmers), probably because of the fears of these threats to the creators of the game (source: source: Itmedia).
At the time of writing, Monster Hunter Wilds Steam review evaluation It is “mixed” and the last reviews are “predominantly negative.” This is mainly due to problems with the operation of the game (or in some cases), especially on PC. Reviewers, regardless of the language in which they write, report similar problems with deteriorating performance, crashing on start-ups and other difficulties with high specification. As for the actual game, fans of the self -proclaimed series were critical of its easier difficulties compared to previous titles, improving mechanics and (current) lack of the final game content.
While there are many constructive criticism of wild monster hunters written in Japanese, which indicate flaws, problems and suggestions about what Capcom must deal with, threats to the programmers themselves, from the vocal minority, seem to be more common in Japan.
Why is it? Compared to abroad, Monster Hunter is a very popular and well -established franchise in Japan. Therefore, there are many passionate fans of this series, and Hype was particularly high in the previous launch of the novel generation entry. As a result, people standing behind Monster Hunter, like the longtime manufacturer of the Ryozo Tsujimoto series, are well known to fans. For example, Tsujimoto appeared in promotional films In the case of Monster Hunter Wilds before releasing it, and perhaps some viewers take such visual interviews about the function of the upcoming game as personal promises about the final game (as evidenced by aggressive comments calling for developers to “leak” in apology). It seems that in the case of Monster Hunter Wilds a combination of social media, unfulfilled expectations and knowledge of game developers created a perfect storm, in which part of the Japanese fandom they were furious and disappointed to threaten the creators themselves.
Such personalized threats have become a problem for other vast Japanese game creators. As emphasized in Sankei Shimbun, many game companies in Japan in the last two years have implemented similar rules against harassment from clients (including Bandai Namco, Square Enix and Sega), reminding people that they will take legal and criminal actions to protect their employees if necessary.
In July last year, Sega undertook legal proceedings against a person who made excessive injuries to their employees on social media. He reached a settlement in which the perpetrator paid compensation, vow to remove all offending comments and not engage in such behavior in the future.
Such threats also had publicly noticeable impact on game companies. Capcom is not the only company that influenced the events. Earlier Nintendo had to Postpone two personal e-sports events and cancel Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo Due to the repetitive threats of death and bombs submitted in the Nintendo Japan investigation in the internet (27-year-old man He was arrested later). How Attack of setting animation in Kyoto It was shown that companies cannot afford to ignore the possibility that some people can act on the basis of online threats and actually hurt or kill people.
Although abuse by companies and online employees is a global problem, it seems that game companies in Japan are currently experiencing greater harassment of their employees in Japanese. It will be captivating to check whether these principles of harassment of customers, as well as the involvement of lawyers and police in more extreme cases, have any impact on the reduction of such behavior.
Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Verity Towsend is a Japanese independent writer who previously served as an editor, collaborator and translator on the Automaton West website. She also wrote about Japanese culture and films for various publications.
