Honoring the GOAT of Bad Game Quotes | This Week in Games

As a journalist, I have a deep and abiding appreciation for a Good Quote.

But as a connoisseur of spoken calamities, I can savor a Bad Quote even more.

When I come across a Good Quote, it tends to a perfect articulation of a specific – often complex – position the speaker holds, boiled down into a simple grouping of words that illuminate the heart of the matter with perfect clarity.

A Bad Quote often does the same thing, but unintentionally. It can be a mask-off moment, a bit of candor crammed full of meaning, a tiny crack in a relentlessly media-trained executive façade, a gap through which we can glimpse an individual's truly held beliefs and values.

Or maybe it's just someone expressing overwhelming certainty about something when they are, in fact, wrong. Staggeringly, stupendously, hilariously wrong.

Pound-for-pound, the games industry might be the world leader in Bad Quote production. It is a Bad Quote sweatshop, churning out gems of sublime idiocy at a prodigious clip.

Seriously, this industry has ideal conditions for the cultivation of Bad Quotes:

● Relatively young field where initial culture was established by a generation of creatives with a pronounced contempt for anything "corporate" and the very idea of "best practices."

● Decades spent targeting horny teen boys as the main demographic, so today's senior workforce consists largely of veterans who were not just compatible with that environment, but excelled in it.

● Not taken seriously by either the people inside of it or the world around it.

● Bobby Kotick.

If there's a better blueprint for Bad Quotes, I can't think of it.

It's high time we recognized the outstanding achievements the games industry has made in the field of Bad Quotes. And to that end, I am announcing the establishment of the Bad Game Quote Hall of Fame.

A Selection Committee of me, myself, and I has been hard at work deliberating who will comprise the inaugural class. Today we recognize these innovators for how they have inspired us all to new heights of eye-rolling, gallows humor, and all-around absurdity.

The rules

Before we get to our inductees, it would be helpful first to explain the Committee's criteria for induction:

● A Bad Quote is one that shocks or staggers in a significant way, whether in its inaccuracy, its mendacity, its callowness, or its shamefulness. Context also matters. A xenophobic rant from a person famous for xenophobic rants will not move the needle like the same rant coming from a beloved developer of iconic family-friendly games.

● Seniority matters. An unknown developer saying something terrible in a preview event gone awry does not matter as much as a platform holder CEO saying something terrible in prepared remarks before investors. In general, randos should be allowed to flub and be forgotten, while the people with the most power, the highest profile, and the largest paychecks can be reasonably held to a higher standard.

● It's called a Hall of "Fame," but Bad Quotes don't actually need to be well-known to be included. Mostly they just need to be Bad.

● There is a four-year minimum waiting period before any Bad Quote can be inducted. It can be difficult to judge just how bad a Bad Quote is in the heat of the moment. The changing context of time can make them seem worse, or better.

Sometimes an obviously bad prediction – like John Riccitiello saying EA's slate of Wii games would be stronger than Nintendo's – turns out to be right, or at least defensible.

Other times, a transparently Bad Quote – like John Riccitiello calling a big chunk of his customers fucking idiots – could look considerably worse a few years down the road. Riccitiello dropped that bomb in 2022, but given the Unity Runtime Fee debacle that followed last year, the complete overhaul in the company's executive ranks since, and whether or not the new crew can right the ship, it's still too early to tell where that quote lies on the spectrum of "ill-advised" to "company-sinking."

If we are going to preserve the sanctity of the Hall and ensure it means something, we can't let in just any old rancid flavor of the week; we need to know it will age like that gallon of milk my dad lost in one of the nooks of the car trunk for a couple weeks. The one that made the car smell like vomit in the summers forever more, even though it was never opened and we cleaned and sanitized everything as best we could. I still get a phantom whiff of it when I get into any car that's been parked in direct sunlight on a hot day.

● Inductions are made on a quote-by-quote basis. So while Riccitiello's late-era Unity statements are off-limits for a while yet, his earlier years with the company and his stint at EA are still fair game.

● Yes, that also means that some people can be inducted twice. We want to acknowledge excellence in Bad Quotes, and it's a sad fact that some people who get burned by touching a hot stove will learn their lesson. We need to recognize those misguided souls whose dedication to Bad Quotes has them slapping the burners like a game of Simon.

That means it's possible (perhaps even probable) that over the course of a career, a single person will earn multiple Quoties. That's our short name for the award. Phonetically it's a portmanteau of "Quote" and "Kotick," who we just assume will be taking home a bunch of these.

● In recognition of gaming's vibrant and multifaceted creative field of Bad Quotes, we have decided to embrace an open nominations process for future classes of inductees. If there's a Bad Quote you feel deserves recognition, please submit your nomination to brendan@unlosingwriter.com and the Committee will give it due consideration.

Some of these quotes will be ones I've brought up in past columns. Repeatedly. In fact, their continued relevance to discussions around the industry is part of the argument for their inclusion.

But before we get to the inaugural class of inductees, first let's go over some of our near-misses.

Dishonorable Mentions

In deliberations to determine the first crop of inductees, these were some of the late cuts made by the Committee. Their placement in this section is in no way intended to diminish their Badness, and the Committee has included its reasonings for not including them in the Hall at this time.

"Customers do not want online games."

Sometimes Nintendo gets burned by its insistence on doing something new that nobody asked for. Sometimes it gets burned by its insistence on sticking with something old despite everyone moving in a new direction.

In the early 2000s, as Microsoft rolled out Xbox Live and Sony dipped its toe into online multiplayer as the future of games, Nintendo held back. Even in 2004, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was downplaying the idea in an interview with Japan Spotlight.

"Customers do not want online games."

While Iwata's comments raised eyebrows even at the time, the Committee chose not to induct this particular quote because he was speaking clearly in the present tense.

At the moment, most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet, and for some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy.

Iwata noted that the holiday best-sellers of 2003 had all been offline titles. And as much as Sony and Microsoft had online play in their consoles of the era, it wouldn't really become a fundamental part of the market until the Xbox 360 and PS3 era.

Even so, the online future was obvious enough that Nintendo's treatment of it as an afterthought was a clear misstep from Iwata, and his assertion of what customers wants was off-base enough to earn a mention here.

"Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan"

Early on in the Xbox 360's lifespan, Xbox Japan division manager Takahashi Sensui boldly proclaimed that Microsoft would definitely turn around the Xbox's fortunes in Japan and give Sony and Nintendo all the competition they could handle in their home country.

"Since the launch of the original Xbox in 2002, there was one thing that we have consistently said: Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan. The Xbox 360 is not just the only next-generation console available in the market, but it will also continue to be the best console for years to come."

Sensui didn't say when exactly Microsoft would succeed in Japan, it certainly didn't happen with the Xbox 360. Or the Xbox One. Earlier this year the Xbox Series X|S hit the 600,000 unit milestone, about three-and-a-half years after launch. Perhaps fearful that the console's popularity was skyrocketing in ways the company was not prepared to deal with, Microsoft quickly responded by hiking the Xbox Series X|S price.

The Committee decided that Xbox's fate in Japan would probably have been the same regardless of who was put in Sensui's position. And to his credit, Microsoft did line up significant exclusive support from Japanese developers in the Xbox 360 era (including Dead Rising, Blue Dragon, Infinite Undiscovery, Lost Odyssey).

Besides, Microsoft spending money until it gets the result it wants is not without precedent.

"Gaming for me is a religion and Haze is the shit!"

It's one thing for a band to license a song to a game. It's another (hopefully much more expensive) thing to get them to actively participate in the marketing for it, like Korn did with Ubisoft's PS3-exclusive first-person shooter Haze.

Here's the quote attributed to Korn frontman Jonathan Davis in the press release announcing the band wrote a song for the game:

"Gaming for me is a religion and Haze is the shit! I had to come up with a track that can hit up that kind of rush I get from the game and I think we really rocked it!!"

In case you were wondering, yes, the multiple exclamation points were in the original press release.

While this is an undeniably Bad Quote, the Committee decided against including it in the inaugural class of the Bad Game Quote Hall of Fame because that quote was almost certainly the creation of an Ubisoft employee writing the press release and there is little chance Davis ever actually said it.

Additionally, Haze (the song) was a pretty generic and forgettable Korn track, which is an appropriate match for Haze (the game), which was a pretty generic and forgettable console first-person shooter.

After much deliberation, the Committee determined that if the goal was to come up with a track to hit up that generic and forgettable kind of rush, then Korn indeed met the base criteria and "really rocked it."

That said, the Committee withholds judgment on whether the band sufficiently "rocked it" to merit an exclamation point, much less two.

Help me help you... to sell a game about sexual assault

Consider that heading a big ol' content warning on this section, obviously.

The big questions with Steam have always revolved around curation. Initially it was too strict, with Valve hand-picking winners from a field of indies desperate to get on the storefront because simply existing there was seen as a guarantee of a certain level of success. The company steadily opened the gates wider until 2018, when it adopted the official policy "to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."

It didn't take long for people (myself included) to point out the many problems with this policy, which basically amounts to, "We're still going to apply our arbitrary subjective judgment of what is allowable just like any other storefront, but we're OK with a lot more heinous crap than the competition."

It took slightly longer for bad actors to take advantage of the policy in a headline-grabbing way, as it wasn't until March of 2019 that a store page for the visual novel Rape Day raised eyebrows.

"Control the choices of a menacing serial killer rapist during a zombie apocalypse," the game's marketing copy said. "Verbally harass, kill, and rape women as you choose to progress the story. It's a dangerous world with no laws. The zombies enjoy eating the flesh off warm humans and brutally raping them but you are the most dangerous rapist in town."

After criticism from many people (myself included), Valve pulled the store page, with the company's biz dev expert Erik Johnson giving us our honorable mention quote:

"After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think 'Rape Day' poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won't be on Steam.

"We respect developers' desire to express themselves, and the purpose of Steam is to help developers find an audience, but this developer has chosen content matter and a way of representing it that makes it very difficult for us to help them do that."

In other words, Valve would have loved to help the misogynist rape fantasy game find an audience of misogynist rape fantasy enthusiasts. That is 100% in line with the company's values and purpose in this world. If this developer had been slightly less obvious about what the game was – had represented it in a way that didn't call so much attention to Valve's complete unwillingness to let societal values restrict its business in the slightest – then of course Valve was going to be an eager business partner for... [lowers glasses to squint and read the title of the game] Rape Day.

As much as this whole scenario was a complete debacle, the Committee decided that Valve's ultimate decision to pull the game relegated the quote at hand to a face-saving exercise with the same crowd of "free-speech absolutists" that raise hell whenever someone tries to de-platform racism and misogyny but is mysteriously silent about – or actively participating in – lawsuits to stop people from calling out antisemitism or presidential candidates proposing to deport protestors.

That quote was a shameful, cowardly face-saving exercise to be sure, but Valve had cleared the very low bar of not being in the rape fantasy business.

OK, now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let's see who's getting the first invites to Blooperstown.

The 2024 Bad Game Quote Hall of Famers

Here they are. It's our Mount Rushmore of Bad Quotes, each one absurd on the face of it, horrifying when you look a little bit deeper, and each speaking to a much larger dysfunction in the way the games industry operates.

"I am a jabbering wreck right now. I need The Benz!"

As part of the Rockstar Games key creative team, Sam Houser is one of the most successful writers in gaming history. So it's fitting that he be one of the Hall's first inductees based on the strength of emails he sent to Leslie Benzies, as revealed in a messy lawsuit over royalties and the latter's departure from Rockstar.

According to Benzies' suit, during the troubled development of Red Dead Redemption, Houser reached out for help in an October 2009 email.

"The ups and downs are VERY extreme. We have to fix this. Quickly. Help! I'm freaking!"

The next day, Houser wrote again.

"This [RDR] is a (recurring) nightmare. But one i/we need to get out of. I have problems with the camera all over the place. So much so, that I can't be rational or specific about it. The darkness!!!"

Houser persisted the next day.

"PLEASE help me/us get rdr [Read Dead Redemption] into shape. I am a jabbering wreck right now. I need The Benz!'"

The Committee chose to induct Houser for these emails because of the sublime way they lay out the truth of so many "auteurs" in the AAA space. Where the majority of the Rockstar leadership's press comes from carefully chosen interviews with mainstream outlets designed to capitalize on their image as maverick creative masterminds with an unerring sense of what makes a game "cool," these emails detailed the uncertainty and insecurity that so often lies behind that veneer.

When you consider that Red Dead Redemption's numerous development and direction issues resulted in a boatload of crunch for the team and precipitated the Rockstar Spouse scandal, not to mention Rockstar's lengthy history of poor working conditions, the emails are an informative perspective into how the shortcomings of leadership translate into burnout, depression, and worse for the staff forced to make up for those shortcomings.

Just as valuably, they also help to puncture some of the mythmaking around big-name AAA talent as thoughtful creative visionaries in complete control of their productions.

There's some possibility that things have changed at Rockstar in the years since, but we'll have to hear how the rest of development on Grand Theft Auto 6 goes to get a better sense of that.

Making the ultimate sacrifice for Ultimate Team

Ultimate Team game modes are big business for Electronic Arts. In fact, they're so big that the publisher has stopped talking about exactly how much they bring in because it was raising some eyebrows.

In 2021, EA reported that its Ultimate Team modes (not including the actual sales of the games that feature these modes) accounted for an all-time high 29% of the publisher's revenues, a figure numerous press outlets reported.

In 2022, EA stopped reporting on Ultimate Team revenues. It hasn't started up again since, because there's still a lot of pushback against the loot box-driven Ultimate Team modes as a form of unregulated gambling, and the publisher is very sensitive to that suggestion.

EA was a lot less sensitive in 2017, when it was still educating investors as to what a ridiculous golden goose their definitely-not-gambling mode was, and how it would keep people glued to EA's products like a Vegas slot junkie compulsively mowing through their life savings to chase a machine-induced dissociative state.

As EA CFO Blake Jorgensen told an audience during a NASDAQ Investor Program:

"We spend very little time trying to get people to spend more money. We really try to spend most of our time getting people into the funnel because we know once they're into the game, they'll really have a good time, and they'll play it for a long period of time."

He would go on to explain exactly how long that could be.

"A $60 video game that people are playing three, four, five thousand hours during the year on, that's a lot of value for your money."

5,000 hours a year playing Ultimate Team.

Here's a fun fact: There are only 8,760 hours in a non-leap year.

If we assume someone has a full eight hours of sleep (because I know EA would only want its games to ever be enjoyed in healthy ways), that leaves just 5,840 hours of time awake. Imagine 5,000 of those being claimed by Ultimate Team.

By Jorgensen's own admission, some people were so hooked on Ultimate Team they were spending an average of 13 hours and 40 minutes a day on it, every single day for a year. Which would leave them about 2 hours and 20 minutes for the rest of life's details: Eating, showering, working, exercising, existing in the world around outside the screen...

Now maybe Jorgensen misspoke. Or maybe these outliers were the result of multiple people sharing a single account or the equivalent of an Ultimate Team goldfarming operation (because people absolutely have ways to cash out of these definitely-not-gambling modes driven by continuously spending money on randomized rewards).

If that were the case, Jorgensen almost certainly would have known. Regardless, he saw 5,000 hours of annual gameplay for one player not as a red flag for a person in desperate need of help, but as a smashing success story for a company built on ruthlessly maximizing engagement because it fills its games with constant purchasing decisions and knows that the longer it can keep people there, the more it can squeeze from them.

The Committee is naming Jorgensen to the Hall's first class for embodying the industry's unbridled enthusiasm for min-maxing its humanity and engagement stats, smothering even the slightest curiosity as to whether established industry practices might be unethical in the abstract or measurably harmful in practice.

The industry as a whole got so used to shrugging off cries of "You're corrupting the children" about cartoonishly violent games that it has reflexively ignored the same cries around its primers for problematic gambling.

But perhaps this is a bit too harsh. After all, given the way legalized betting has utterly consumed actual sports in recent years, this is just another way for EA Sports to make good on the slogan, "If it's in the game, it's in the game."

The buck stops anywhere else

You know your sexist work culture scandal is a big deal when your executives aren't just acknowledging it during a post-earnings conference call, but having to field pointed questions about it from an audience of analysts and investors.

If we ever start a Good Game Quote Hall of Fame, Jefferies analyst Ken Rumph will be a strong contender for inclusion based on the question he asked Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot in the first investor call after the company's scandal blew up in the summer of 2020.

"Regarding what's happened recently, there are kind of three options. Either as CEO, you didn't know this was happening, which is not great. Or you perhaps didn't know enough and should have asked more, maybe that's the answer. Or you knew, which of course would not be good. Now those are my possibilities. You may answer the question differently. But I'd like to ask what would be your answer to the question about your responsibility as CEO."

Naturally, Guillemot didn't accept any of those three options. Instead, he proposed a fourth scenario, one where he, as a co-founder and longtime CEO of the company, is somehow not responsible for the toxic company culture that took hold and festered for decades, but just another helpless victim.

"Each time we've been made aware of misconduct, we made tough decisions, and made sure that those decisions had a clear and positive impact. It has now become clear that certain individuals betrayed the trust I placed in them, and didn't adhere to Ubisoft's shared values. So I have never compromised on my core values and ethics, and I never will."

You see? He was betrayed! Can you imagine the horror, the absolute violation this CEO must have felt upon having his underlings tell him what he wanted to hear? How could any leader possibly consider that people accused of workplace misconduct might... gasp.. lie when asked about it?!? Rank betrayal!

I do believe that Guillemot never compromised on his core values and ethics though, because that's impossible for anyone to do. What actually happens is that our actions draw a distinction between the core values and ethics we might believe we have from the ones we actually do have.

The Committee has decided to induct this particular quote because it so perfectly encapsulates the sorry state of executive accountability in the games industry. It does happen sometimes, but rarely.

"We are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression"

It would be very odd to wrap up the first round of Quoties without hearing from their partial namesake.

And while there's no shortage of banger Bobby Kotick quotes out there to choose from, there is one that will always stand above the others in my mind. A Quote so Bad it doesn't just stand head and shoulders above the rest of Kotick's Bad Quote output, but one the Committee felt deserved recognition even above and beyond the rest of the inductees.

The GOAT of Bad Quotes, if you will, delivered by Kotick at an investor event 15 years ago.

"I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.

"I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

(The story linked above is dated February of 2010 but as we can tell from posts citing the original GameSpot piece, it actually ran in September of 2009. I don't know why the GameSpot time stamp is wrong.)

This quote is timeless for so many reasons. First of all, there's the context. Like in the Guillemot quote above, Kotick was responding to a question from an analyst, in this case Deutsche Bank Securities' Jeetil Patel.

Unlike in the Guillemot quote above, Patel was not asking an insightful and pointed question about some perceived failing of Kotick's. While Kotick's quote is all about his management style for running a game company, Patel hadn't asked him about anything of the sort. If you look at Patel's question, he just wanted some idea of how aggressive retailers would be in ordering games headed into the holiday season:

"What do you think the retailers' willingness these days is to hold inventory on the video game side? Are they building positions today or are they still very reluctant and very careful of how they are buying?"

This wasn't a "gotcha" question, or someone trying to get Kotick to talk about a touchy subject in any way, shape, or form. Kotick was asked about something else and went out of his way to step in this particular pile of excrement.

The bit about him wanting to take all the fun out of making games was what got headlines on industry blogs, but it's his endorsement of psychological-abuse-as-effective-management that really demanded the Committee's attention.

When Kotick made those remarks in September of 2009, the industry was still in the thick of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. Activision itself had just completed a round of layoffs at Raven Software the month before and would make a wider round of cuts across the company a few months later. When Kotick talks about keeping his employees focused on the deep depression, there's no cute or funny way to take that. It's just cruelty.

Presumably, Kotick said what he said because he believed it was what his audience wanted to hear, and he didn't expect the games media of the time to be listening to an investor-focused event or reporting it out to be seen by his employees. I imagine he just wanted to please his stakeholders, specifically investors who believed that squeezing the workers would get the most profitable for them.

As for his employees, he never appeared to see them as stakeholders. Kotick bragged in that same investor event that the company's incentive program "really rewards profit and nothing else," but the guy had a habit of embarking on mass layoffs during times of record profit, and his own IT head testified that Kotick rewarded the developers who delivered Activision's biggest franchise of all time by searching for a reason to fire them.

Kotick is gone from Activision Blizzard now, but we've seen new parent company Microsoft proudly carry on the layoffs-amid-record-profits tradition. And this is really why Kotick's quote merited not just enshrinement in the Hall's inaugural class, but a spotlight above and beyond its peers.

For decades, Bobby Kotick was a singular figure in the video game industry, loathed by many in the press and the workforce alike, but lauded by investors for whom he admittedly made a considerable amount of money.

But he wasn't unique in that regard. Other executives treated employees poorly, and other executives made lots of money for their investors. The thing that really set Kotick apart from his peers was that he didn't care as much about optics, so he was prone to going a bit more mask-off than other gaming execs.

The Committee includes Kotick's comments from 2009 as our final inductee in the inaugural class because it serves as a timely reminder of the true nature of the relationship between executives and developers in the industry. As much as their interests may align and overlap at times, they are by no means shared.

Executives in the industry have always understood this and used it to their advantage against a workforce largely motivated by a passion for the product.

It's no coincidence that the unionization push largely began in Activision Blizzard studios like Raven Software and Blizzard Albany and has continued growing since. Kotick wanted to take the fun out of making games, but in succeeding at that goal, he convinced the people who make Activision Blizzard games to join the executives in treating the business like a business instead of a hobby.

As a fun little bonus quote to end all this, I want to talk about Guitar Hero: Van Halen briefly. The game released in December of 2009, just a few months after Kotick made his remarks about wanting "to take all the fun out of making games."

The rhythm game genre was pretty clearly saturated at that point, so Activision ran a promotion where anyone who preordered Guitar Hero 5 before its September launch would receive a free copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen when it launched.

While I was much more of a Rock Band fan by that point, the freebie had me thinking I might as well jump. When the Van Halen disc arrived in the mail several months later, it came with a little note, including a wonderfully subtle little blessing/curse:

"We hope you have as much fun playing the game as we had making it."

If you liked this piece, please consider signing up for the Unlosing Writer newsletter. It's free, but if you enjoy the work, I would greatly appreciate a monthly subscription or a one-time tip.

Sign up for Unlosing Writer

It's what Pepsiman would want.

Subscribe

Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.