After being honored at The Game Awards for helping laid-off devs, Amir Satvat says he's received 'countless' hateful messages: 'This can happen to you too when you sacrifice over 2,000 hours of your time to help the industry'
Amir Satvat, the recipient of the first «Game Changers» award at this year's Game Awards, says he's received «countless hateful messages» as well as «disturbing comments» following his acceptance of the award last week, including antisemetic remarks about his wife.
«I am continuing to do my best to tune this out but it is quite extreme,» Satvat said in a LinkedIn post.
During the event, Geoff Keighley admitted that he's «struggled» to know how best to address the unprecedented rash of games industry layoffs we've seen over the past few years. It was the first time the host and producer directly addressed layoffs at the awards, and the solution he came up with was to honor Satvat, a figure well-known in the games business for his efforts to help laid-off developers find new work.
A brief video segment described how Satvat's project has helped «place nearly 3,000 people in jobs,» and Satvat accepted the award with a tearful speech in which he challenged the crowd to make the industry better.
Many viewers responded positively to the segment, including viewers in the industry, but some have criticized it as a cynical attempt to keep up the appearance of caring while celebrating the very people responsible for the poor state of the business—the executives in the audience whose companies ultimately fund The Game Awards. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who oversaw Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and the subsequent layoffs, is on the show's advisory board, for example.
Some critics went well beyond denouncing the awards, however: After the ceremony, Satvat himself came under attack for his job at Tencent, where he's been a business development director for about a year and a half. The suggestion going around social media is that Satvat was presented as a kind of folk hero, but is actually part of the problem—or even a sinister «industry plant» whose heartwarming story was entirely manufactured.
Satvat says that his job wasn't mentioned during the show
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