http://boards.4channel.org/v/thread/494938805#p494938805

This was originally posted by Bruh69 (AWESOME name btw! :P). I couldn’t get around to it last week. I had to duck and cover from some turbulent weather.

Anywho, a couple of things here are there are already familiar if you’ve been keeping up with Sega’s nonsense for years. Low wages, having no respect for the fans…. even their biggest asskisser, Tailschannel, gets no love. No idea who Hogfather is. Kinda weird how Sega somehow has no money for anything despite Yakuza games having all this budget. Yeah sure, same city and reused assets, but I doubt those models and music numbers are cheap. Too much about that series says otherwise. Aaron Webber being a control freak is actually funny, with the lack of testosterone he has.

In general, a lot of what the guy says isn’t surprising at all. We could tell just by Sega’s behavior since…. forever, that they have routinely displayed outright disdain for their audiences (the non-japanese ones). You don’t have to look any further than the Shining Force Take downs on Youtube some years back, or the BS involving PSO2. Hell, you can go back to the whole “Did you know about the Chaotix splitting apart?” bullshit they were talking to explain away how retarded the roster setup was in TSR in that they think very little of our intelligence.

But… this 4chan post exposed a lot more than what folks are giving credit for. See, when Webber started going around and flagging people’s tweets, you had quite a few people coming to his defense. “He’s just doing his job” and whatnot. Now, I don’t’ know all the details, and it’s difficult to track down exact posts or tweets on it, all I got is this.

Normally, something like that would be infuriating. But… it puts a smile on my face. Because now it makes all of our (unpaid) jobs a helluva lot easier.

These…. are…. all….. corporate shills.

Gamers are a very pretentious breed. They don’t respect any game company unless their output is of high quality, and that their people are respectful of their consumer base. Gamers will never have anything good to say about a company that routinely mistreats their fans. So when you see people going to bat for Webber who’s going around and flagging people’s tweets for containing a link that exposes Sega as the #3 Japanese asshole factory (behind Namco and Nintendo) that doesn’t even respect their biggest ass lickers, that should come as a giant red flag. Gamers… won’t… simply… do this…. unless there’s a pay out. Otherwise, you won’t find any gamer standing up for this nonsense.

Last year, Jim Sterling had videos talking about a guy, Yernstrom or whatever, and his lecture on whaling. The most important clip of that whole lecture was the part where he talked about social manipulation. How you want to tell your customers that the most respectable behavior is to be paying. That you don’t want to tell people that they can win their games without paying. Never tell them that. And how people who don’t buy don’t get respect in their communities. They’re bullied. There’s no other way for this to work outside of their own company employees infiltrating fan communities and taking control of the discourse. Word of mouth is the best form of marketing as people tend to be drawn to something if other people talk about how great it is. People trust the words of the common folk rather than the words of advertisers. Advertisers can and will lie about their products.

This is why reviewers were often sought after for an honest opinion on a product before people would go and see for themselves if that product is worth money. When industries learned of that, they started paying off reviewers for good ratings. Obviously, the guy who was famous for giving Twilight Princess an 8.8 got fired for giving a low review score to a game his employer was promoting. Then of course, people learned that reviewers were being paid off, and people stopped trusting them… and going to the common folk again. Youtubers who made their way without being bought off by the companies. So the industries started to buy them off too. That’s why you got people like Angry Joe giving the Witcher 3 a perfect score even though he outright admits that it’s not a perfect game. He even has a voice credit in that game iirc. Same for the Honest Trailers voice having a credit in MVCI.

We should not kid ourselves and assume Sega isn’t pulling the same shit. Ken Penders, infamous author of the Archie Comics (and a little too clingy to Julie-Su) recently made a statement that the real fans are not online. And that’s true when you have people complaining that people kept appreciating Sonic Adventure and Unleashed over other games in the series . The “frauds” kept making all of these incredulous arguments about why Sonic content in the last decade has been good when all facts of the matter have been pointing to the exact opposite. Why they’ve been trying to tell Yuji Naka what his intent was with the subject matter of Sonic. Why the Archie Comics have been getting double the heat as of late as opposed to years past. Why the IDW arcs of zombots are getting all of this praise for subject matter that would otherwise have been unacceptable elsewhere. Sega has a vested interest in invalidating their critics. That’s why they’ve been fighting harder and harder with bullshit arguments, like how Sonic Mania being on sale is a good indicator of it’s success. You have so many people going around spouting on about Mania’s massive success, and they have yet to produce some numbers to vindicate that.

Like I said, idk all the details, but I find it hard to believe that ACTUAL fans would be out there caping for the company despite what they’ve been doing. Too much evidence supports that Sega is an asshole factory. It’s a little odd how only Sonic fans would be so…. persistant and stubborn in backing Sega when NO ONE ELSE is that stupid.