“But there’s no point giving people a present if they don’t KNOW they’ve been given it. So I wrote a long piece on Substack, telling the story,” Gough wrote in the Twitter thread. “It went mildly viral. A terrific editor at a major global media organisation read the piece, and got in touch.”
When the undisclosed media organization reached out to Microsoft, Gough says the company refused to reply. According to the writer, Microsoft’s silence was the company’s way of circumventing the . Rather than making a big deal out of news only to make the news become a bigger story, the article was scrapped.“And… it worked. Silence worked. The lawyers at the media organisation, understandably but annoyingly, lost their nerve,” Gough wrote. “Without a comment, even a ‘no comment’, it was impossible to tell what Microsoft knew or planned to do. And that was too much risk for the media organisation’s lawyers, because Microsoft [has] 1700 lawyers and unlimited financial firepower.
“If they said or did anything, we could have reacted to it. If they made a good objection, we could have changed a few lines, and published,” Gough wrote. “If they made a bad objection, we could have shown them proof that we were right, and published.”its been interesting seeing his Twitter thread receive a support from fellow writers and folks in the video games industry.
“I’ve even received PayPal donations from Microsoft employees! That was a pleasant surprise,” Gough said. “And I’ve had some eye-opening DMs from writers, and other creatives, who feel they were screwed over by big games companies, but who are afraid to say anything in public, because they worry they will be quietly blacklisted. There’s a lot of hurt out there.”Minecraft
Lmao 💀