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Subnautica Team Fires Dev For Being Conservative

The sound designer for popular marine survival sim Subnautica has been fired for politically incorrect tweets, after far-left keyboard warriors put pressure on his (apparently equally left wing) employers – who then held a poll on Twitter asking if their players wanted to play as a female, which they then deleted after the answer was a resounding ‘no’ and vowed to make them play as a woman anyway.

Polish national Simon Chylinski was targeted after expressing various conservative-leaning opinions on his personal Twitter account – or after having “made many hateful statements online” as his employers put it.

Critics on far-left gaming website resetera (a successor of sorts to NeoGaf) objected to such heinous crimes as agreeing with an Infowars journalist, pointing out that women are treated better in Western countries, and sexually identifying as an attack helicopter:

The resetera thread that served as a focal point for criticism of the sound designer has seen multiple users banned for claiming that the anti-Chylinski campaign was a witch-hunt, and the thread itself was locked after Chylinski announced that he was fired.

The community manager in full shut-it-down mode:

As the individual in question is no longer working on the game, this thread appears to have run its course.

The creators of the game have been pressured over being insufficiently “progressive” for some time; before this incident, the focus was on the gender of the protagonist, with many demanding an option to play as a female and some expressing disgust over the fact that the majority of fans would rather see the devs’ limited resources focused on improving core gameplay.

Chylinski himself has been surprisingly sympathetic to the employers who dismissed him. Although he said that he “should have the freedom to express myself without being fired”, and that he thought the devs would reprimand him privately rather than fire him, Chylinski believes that they simply did not know how to respond to the behaviour of leftist Twitter users.

Commenting on them personally, he added:

These guys are not bad people. I don’t want to paint them that way…They are very talented and on a personal level they are nice to be around.

The response from other internet users, who see this as the latest in a long line of politically motivated censorship due to an increasingly intolerant strain of identity politics, has been less sympathetic. Angry consumers have made their feelings known on the steam forums and review sections, and many have demanded refunds due to the actions of the game’s creators.

The effects of this firing on the fame are as yet unknown, although it has been pointed out that the music and sound effects have been a large part of the game’s appeal, and the removal of the sound designer could be damaging. The PR and legal ramifications are rather more obvious however…

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