Sarah LeBoeuf
Lionhead’s Tasteless Tweets Are Just the Latest Examples of Gaming’s ‘Boys Only’ Culture
It’s a story anyone who follows the gaming industry has become familiar with: a corporate Twitter account posted something that may have shown poor judgment. Responses were angry, Tweets were deleted, and an apology was issued. Microsoft’s Lionhead Studios, or the social media manager behind the account, certainly isn’t the first to commit this kind of gaffe, and I have no doubt that it was meant to be a harmless joke. Sadly, when you’re constantly bombarded with imagery that conveys the message that you’re not wanted, it’s not hard to read more into it.
How Impact Winter Turned Kickstarter Failure Into Steam Success
In October 2014, a little-known UK indie studio launched a Kickstarter campaign for Impact Winter, a survival RPG described as “Fallout meets Oregon Trail.” It was an ambitious project for the small development team, with the Kickstarter description touting “open-world gameplay with dynamic weather, haunting interiors and fearsome wildlife” on a relatively small budget of £95,000 (around $150,000). One month later, the campaign concluded with Mojo Bones reaching not even a quarter of its fund-raising goal, and that was the last we heard of Impact Winter… until last week, when the project reemerged on Steam Greenlight and was approved in under three days.