Last night THQ Nordic caused a storm on social media by revealing on Twitter that they were hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on 8chan and "we have no idea why." The reason for this controversy is because 8chan has come under fire in the past for various reasons, including hosting discussions from child predators.
"The opportunity was here and we took it, we got approached in a very friendly and polite manner and were assured, said person (shoutout to Mark) will take care of the nasty stuff. so, here we are," THQ Nordic added.
In the hours following the announcement there was a huge backlash on Twitter and beyond about the move, which subsequently forced Philipp Brock - PR & Marketing Director of THQ Nordic GmbH (Vienna, Austria) - to issue the following statement hours later:
"I personally agreed to this AMA without doing my proper due diligence to understand the history and the controversy of the site. I do not condone child pornography, white supremacy, or racism in any shape or form.
"I am terribly sorry for the short-sightedness of my (!) decision, and promise to be far more vigorous in my assessment of these activities in the future. This was not about being edgy, this blew up and I very much regret to have done it in the first place."
The controversy kind of overshadowed some of the answers given in the AMA itself, including the fact that "we are actually looking at open sourcing some of our stuff [but] it's a tricky process as we need to clear the rights fully."
Those hoping for news on Timesplitters, however, got the following message: "Timesplitters is a Koch Media property and they will sort these things out. Destroy All Humans on the other hand.. we can not yet talk about it."
THQ Nordic also talks about porting older console titles to PC; their aim "to make stuff available on as many platforms as possible"; and that "old THQ wanted to do a shooter like Splatoon before Splatoon." Without a doubt though the mere existence of the AMA on the platform caught more headlines than the actual content though, and was met with the expected response from the 8chan community when it went live.