Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford isn’t exactly the most well-liked man in the video game industry. Most famous for the Aliens: Colonial Marines debacle, in which his development studio was accused of false advertising and Pitchford went on to call his critics “sadists,” he may be well respected by many of his peers and responsible for overseeing the development of some great games, but a large portion of his audience have less than kind words to say about him.
One of the latest controversies he’s been embroiled in has been the ongoing struggles of Battleborn, Gearbox’s 2016 FPS that struggled to set the world on fire and wound up being the butt of many jokes throughout the year. Pitchford has been criticized for refusing to make the game free-to-play despite its desolate servers, and now he’s been accused of desperation after linking to Battleborn porn — yes, actual Battleborn porn — from his official Twitter account.
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Pitchford took to Twitter to say that he had “received reports” that Battleborn porn had made its way to Reddit, before linking out to the (very NSFW) r/BattlebornRule34 subreddit.
VERY NSFW, but I have received reports that BattlebornRule34 is now a thing on Reddit. LINK WITH CAUTION: https://t.co/laA7tR4Dgs
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) January 16, 2017
Many began accusing Pitchford of desperately trying to put the spotlight back on his game by encouraging more “rule 34” art of the game’s characters, with Redditors then working towards trolling the Gearbox CEO from the subreddit he had linked to. Shortly following Pitchford’s tweet, a post titled ‘Overwatch is better’ because the highest rated thread on the BattlebornRule34 subreddit ever, while another post reading ‘I love Battleborn‘ linked out to a rule 34 image of the Overwatch hero Mei.
With erotic Overwatch art having become highly popular since the release of Blizzard’s FPS — Pornhub recently revealed that the game was one of its most popular search terms of 2016 — many accused Pitchford of trying to capitalize on its success by way of trying to make Battleborn porn more prevalent. Unfortunately, it appears to have backfired in a big way, and now anyone who clicks through his Twitter feed will be greeted by a plethora of insults directed towards his game. An effective, but nonetheless completely childish, way of getting your point across.
