The Kotaku Viewpoint

It seems like the whole world has jumped on the bandwagon of speaking out against Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing. The guy did have an epic fail in customer support for N-Control Avenger game controllers. Was the backlash overdone? You know it. Did the schlub deserve it. Probably. But what about the other perps in this fiasco?

N-Control obviously hired Christoforo. They might not have done their due diligence. Or they were too busy. Maybe Christoforo made them an offer they could not refuse. They should have. I think we should look at the customer Dave. We should definitely look to Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade for his involvement. This last stance could get my lynched as well. Mike seems to have an arsenal of supporters in the game industry.

What I find remarkable is Owen Good's piece on Kotaku citing Krahulik as the real bully in this mess. Now some argue that Good is just trying to get some page views. You know how controversy draws eyeballs. I hope this was not his intent. Instead I rather like to think of him as going against the mobs on the net, when jumping on the mob bandwagon would be much easier.

For his somewhat unique perspective, and courageous outlike, I salute Owen Good. I am looking forward to more of this on Kotaku.

Damage Control

N-Control has a disaster on their hands. To start with, they seem to be unable to fulfill orders for their Avenger controllers. To make matters infinitely worse, the customer support fiasco with Paul Christoforo is dragging them down into the gutter. What is a company to do in such a situation?

They fired Ocean Marketing and Christoforo to start with. Then a guy named Eli Schwartz claimed to be the Marketing Director for the company. He tried to deal with outraged gamers dissing the controller on Amazon. It turns out that Schwartz was a high school intern for the company. He was in over his head.

Since then, Moises Chiullan has taken the helm. He is doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over on Reddit. That might be difficult as the Redditors are a tough crowd. Moises is spinning the best he can. One technique is to make Christoforo to be the common bad guy. And he can try to make N-Control look like another victim. This also might be tricky, as they are probably not blameless. Let's see how this eventually pans out.