Cirulis vs. Chick: Referee Stops Contest
A little irony coming up here.There's quite the tiny pissing contest going on between Tom Chick and Martin Cirulis, the CEO of Kerberos, who developed Sword of the Stars.
Actually, that's inaccurate. Martin Cirulis is in a pissing contest, but he's the only one involved, which means he's the only one getting wet.
Tom Chick wrote the manual for Gal Civ II on a contract basis. He was paid a one-time fee. Tom Chick also has Hall of Fame status as a game reviewer--not because his instincts are unerring (no ones are), but because he's thoughtful and interesting and an excellent writer.
So Tom reviewed Sword of the Stars and didn't like the game. Hey, get in line--out of 20 reviews listed at GameRankings.com, only 4 were 80 or above. Tom, however, gave the game the lowest review score it's received--4 on a scale of 1-10.
At some point, Cirulis realized that Chick had written the manual for Gal Civ II. To him, it's the grassy knoll in Dallas--it's proof that Chick wanted Sword of the Stars to fail.
I guess a shitload of people wanted it to fail, because 6 of those 20 reviews I mentioned earlier are 60 or below, which is a very low score for anything that isn't a budget title. I guess Cirulis will close that circle in time, though, because it's obviously a massive conspiracy.
Cirulis has been so persistent that Chick actually addressed it over at Quarter to Three. Here's an excerpt:
Cirulis’ insinuations via email, first through his hired PR agency to my editors and then directly from him to me, have been insulting. He’s questioned my integrity and made cryptic remarks about resorting to “other venues” to resolve the issue. It reminds me of his other attempts to mute negative opinions. Cirulis bullied Worthplaying into revising a skeptical preview and then running a new preview written by one of his personal friends. After the demo for Sword of the Stars was released, critical posts and threads were routinely removed from Kerberos’ message board and people who didn’t like the game were banned. Posting as “mecron”, Cirulis dismisses complaints with accusations of “GalCiv2 fanboy”. Or “manual writer”.
I checked the Kerberos forums and that's an accurate description. Here's a comment on their forums this morning from Erinys (Arinn), whose forum tag indicates that he is a Kerberos employee. This is in reference to the editorial Chick has written:
The piece is neither eloquent nor elegant; it's the whine of a bullying weasel who has been caught with his journalistic integrity down around his ankles. And given that the man has his own forum with 4000 members, ties to a bigger developer, and a job at a high-circulation magazine, I'm starting to wonder--exactly how much firepower does he really need to bring to bear against a small studio which consists of ten people?
Wow. A "bullying weasel." But wait, aren't you the guys who deleted negative forum posts and pressured magazines into rewriting previews? Hey, who's the real bullying weasel here?
Here's the irony. I was really looking forward to this game, thanks to Jason Price's terrific series of articles over at Talk Strategy. But when the demo came out and I saw how they were ridiculing people who had critical comments concerning the game, I decided not to get it, because they sounded like jerks.
Tom actually goes out of his way to point out that most of the people he dealt with at Kerberos aren't jerks, but jerks are like garlic--even a little bit overwhelms every other flavor in the food.
So long before before Tom Chick's review came out, they'd already lost me as a potential customer, simply because they couldn't handle criticism in a professional manner.
When has this strategy of attacking your critics EVER worked for a gaming company? Has it ever generated goodwill and additional sales? I can't remember a single gaming example where this didn't end very, very badly. This never works. And somebody at Kerberos should have had the stones to say that to Cirulis before the post-demo forum messages started getting out of hand, because those messages absolutely killed any good will the company had built up over the game.
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