Beware these Gamergate tactics when discussing the news.

Intro

A portion of this sub love to scream "misinformation" and blame "game journalists". This should raise everyone's alarm by the way since it's a very Gamergate. What's ironic is that these people are themselves fairly ignorant and are spreading actual misinformation regarding the lay off.

I have a lot of opinions about this topics, but I want to stick to a few simple facts here.

1. The word "director"

People who've worked in a big corporation, especially a multi-national one know that there are like a dozen of directors for every function or region. Thaddeus's LinkedIn profile still lists him as Game Director you can look it up easily. So there is actually no grand "misinformation campaign" like some people here claim. The journalists reported what they could find at the moment and reached out to NetEase for further official comment. Standard, good practice.

Guangguang is what the people in the industry often refers to as the Creative Director, someone who oversees every the project at the highest level and often reserves the right to decide how it goes. NetEase themselves use this term to refer to him, if you don't believe me you can look it up. No serious journalist claimed that the Creative Director of the project was laid off.

But what about the community manager (James) discord comment? He did say that the game has only one director who is Guanguang, but as explained above, the term Creative Director and the business function of a director in a MNC are very different thing. This guy is NetEase's mouthpiece, of course he would phrase thing in a way that's most beneficial for the company. Doesn't change the fact I've explained above. Also this isn't a legal/official statement. In their official statement to PCGamer, they avoided this topic. Please know the difference.

2. Only a support team

Many on here claimed that the team was just a support team so it was no big deal. First of all, insane claim. People are still people and support functions are as crucial to the success of a product as any other.

Secondly, it's also not true. When people say "support", many think "customer support". But this simply wasn't the case. NetEase statement only says that the team is part of a "larger global design function in support of Marvel Rivals", which is basically just corporate talk to assure stakeholders that the value of their investment isn't going down.

Often in the same posts where people make this claim and get upvoted in the hundreds, you can find other people who say the team is an R&D team. So you can see the redditors who gather to fight against misinformation don't even get their own story straight.

As a bonus: people also claim that this team is under contract work. As far as I know there is nothing official to back this up.

Conclusion

So what you can see here is that people who claim to be against misinformation are actually not even reading or thinking critically at all. Instead, they want to jump on the wagon, shift blame onto journalists while spreading even more misinformation themselves. Once again a very Gamergate tactic.