At the most basic level, the origins of the new “Save Titanfall” campaign appear to be benevolent. The first Titanfall game has been unplayable for over two years because of a racist hacker who has filled online lobbies with unavoidable hate speech. At the time of writing, it absolutely should not be on sale - and yet, for some weird reason, it is.
Back in April, Respawn Entertainment stated in a Tweet that it would actively work on fixing the game, which we’ve since heard very little more about. A few months is admittedly not a lot of dev time, but what about the two years before that? Also, I’d like to think that actively fighting against racism - even if it’s for an old game that isn’t printing money - should take precedence over new Apex Legends skins, or whatever, especially when Apex has used its loading screens to display messages in support of Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate.
I don’t mean to lambast Respawn unfairly. I’m sure a lot of the individual devs at the studio want nothing more than for Titanfall to be fixed, which is actually why I’m writing this piece. Titanfall is currently in a completely unacceptable state, but taking your frustration out on innocent developers and fans with literally zilch to do with the game is immature, irresponsible, and just plain selfish. “Save Titanfall” - save it how, exactly? By making a game beloved by millions of people all over the world completely inaccessible? Big brain move, bud. You really showed them.
On top of that, the second you bring up the fact that you’ve messaged individual devs who haven’t responded to you, you’ve already lost. That’s not acceptable behaviour whatsoever - devs can’t just up and quit their career because they’re assigned to work on Apex. They’re given a job to do, and regardless of whether or not they’d prefer to work on Titanfall, they’ve got bills to pay just like you and me. You do not have the right to send devs abuse, let alone death threats, over a video game, so when a stunt like this mentions reaching out to developers personally and lambasts them for not replying, what do you think happens next? More people message them, and the messages get consistently worse and more vitriolic.
I get the sentiment of why resolving Titanfall’s awful issues is essential, and I obviously agree with it. While I think a lot of the people who shout at strangers online about Titanfall 3 should probably find a hobby, the first game is in desperate need of fixing or delisting. In most cases, I’d understand support being cut off for an older game, especially given that Respawn is currently working on both Apex Legends and Star Wars. It’s not that there are only a few people playing, though, or that the lobbies are a bit laggy - it’s that the entire servers have been usurped by one colossal prick for over two years, who has consistently used them to post disgusting hate speech. If you don’t want to fix the servers, shut them down. If the logic is that the game is no longer profitable enough to justify reworking it, take it off digital storefronts. If a problem presents itself and you are the one responsible for solving it, you can’t just leave it there as it simmers, festers, and erupts into an issue 1,000 times the size of the original one. But the onus to do that is not on any one individual person who probably wants to see a solution just as much as the rest of us.
But again, you can’t just hack games either. I logged into Twitter on Sunday and saw loads of people I know who were genuinely upset that they couldn’t play Apex Legends. These are all normal, innocent people who wanted to spend their Sunday evening playing a game with pals for a few hours, likely before a long week of work. They turn on their PC, right, or their PS4, or their Xbox Series X, and all of a sudden… boom! “Save Titanfall, hack Apex.” That achieves absolutely nothing - if you want the devs to fix Titanfall, why would you make it so that they have to fix Apex on their day off? That logic is so ludicrous it sounds like some sort of meme, and yet this is exactly what happened over the weekend - which was a holiday weekend, mind. One person managed to instantly and simultaneously hurt developers and fans in a single fell swoop while also accomplishing approximately none of what they wanted. What an extraordinary waste of time and resources - what a sincerely moronic attempt to achieve something that is objectively good, and worthwhile, and selfless. Maybe it was the case of impulse governing would-be rationality - there’s no way to tell. All we know for sure is that a lot of people were affected by it, and at the time of writing, it seems as if all a malware attack like this does is make it even harder for people who want to fix something to actually fix it.
So many people are focusing on the wrong parts of this story. The issue is not that Titanfall hasn’t been fixed in the last few months - it’s that Respawn and EA already knew what was happening for two years before that. The issue is not that Titanfall doesn’t make enough money to justify supporting, or that it takes a certain amount of time to kick out a hacker, or that someone is actively making both Apex and Titanfall actively harder to work on - although that last part is technically true.
The issue is that we are talking about a defective product that is currently little more than a purchasable anthology of hate. It needs to be fixed or taken off sale, but neither of those things can be done if you’re making sure the developer responsible for doing them has its hands tied with a different problem, and they absolute don't justify reaching out to specific people to hurl abuse at them. The entire situation is a mess, and it’s sad to see the community around such a phenomenal game regress into idiocy and a complete lack of empathy.