2023-08-01
Project Moon continues to maintain radio silence. However, more details about the broader cultural context have made their way into the English-speaking scene in the days since. In about two days, Project Moon will need to answer questions from the Gyeonggido Assembly, which is the government for the province they work in. A Reddit post says that Project Moon has received funding from organizations that receive public money that need to comply with public scrutiny around making sure that companies they fund in turn are acting in accordance with the social good. I think that's how it shakes out, you can read the post yourself to clear up the parts I'm not understanding super well myself. The tl;dr at the bottom says they're being funded in a way that makes them susceptible to public outcry and loss of funding if they do something wildly illegal, and they appear to have done that with the firing. It's genuinely kind of incredible how much they have fucked up here by just continuing with the path of least resistance that they've been taking with their approach to balancing the game, of just bending imediately to people complaining. Again, that's an okay if questionable approach when it comes to balancing a game. It is an extremely not okay approach when it comes to labor, and it seems like the unions are ready to strangle them for it. Rightfully, I would add, if my stance on labor weren't already apparent.
2023-07-29
As the situation's been developing over the last few days, Project Moon has stayed quiet. The initial reports of them firing their illustrator illegally seem to have come out as false. They gave her notice of firing, as far as I've seen, but that might have just been hearsay. However, the controversy has gotten people to started looking into Project Moon's corporate culture and management style, and one of the Xeets looking at their Glassdoor reviews said that the "CEO is incredibly emotional. I could occasionally hear loud crashing sounds from inside the meeting room as he threw objects, and it was commonplace for him to criticize you in front of the entire office if an issue were to arise. His criteria for giving out incentives were also unclear. The CEO said he'd give out large bonuses to the people who "worked hard and struggled a lot" according to his standards, but...? What exactly is that?" which indicates the sorts of problems you'd expect to see from someone with no management experience working with other people with no former management experience. It's amateur hour over there, and it seems clear that upper management is a bunch of college grads who are in way over their heads and learning everything through trial by fire. It would probably be for the best if the CEO stepped down into a creative officer position and hired someone else to be in charge of management.
Additionally, with some reflection it does seem like the situation's been building to something like this since Project Moon has been developing a habit of responding to pressure by bending over immediately. While this is an okay if questionable strategy when it comes to balancing and nerfs in the game, it becomes more of an issue when it comes to hiring and firing staffers.
2023-07-26:
Currently, South Korean indie company Project Moon is on fire. Previously, they made the well-received story-driven games Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina. I'll leave the feminist textual analysis to the Tumblr blogs but they can pretty easily be read that way and a lot of people did read them that way. A few months back they released their new gacha game, Limbus Company. It was pretty solid, if a bit rough around the edges, but the writing was leagues above most of the competition, only really in competition with Fate/Grand Order and maybe Heaven's Burn Red as far as decently-written gacha games go.
Now, the event: To understand what's going on, we need to understand the political climate in South Korea. There are some issues over there, the government being pretty much completely captured by the megaconglomerates like Samsung and LG for example, but the part we're focused on today deals with the gacha market and how Korean incels are an organized and violent force that has the backing of the government that riles up trouble to get what they want. The trouble today started with Limbus Company announcing the summer event and put the character Ishmael into a full-body latex wetsuit instead of a bikini. This got posted to one of the places where the Korean incels congregate and promptly set things off with some manufactured outrage.
Now, for a cultural reference point, I would like you to remember what Gamergate was like, because that's roughly the tone and type of person I'm talking about when I talk about who's causing trouble here. Naturally, if you remember Gamergate you will remember how much they absolutely hated feminists. This is true of this group of South Koreans as well. Promptly, they went looking for the artist's profile and, on finding that the artist who came up with the offending wetsuit design was a man, turned their attention to anyone else in the company. After some searching, they found a deleted retweet from an unrelated CG artist (who happened, curiously, to be a woman) that was talking about something that could conceivably be construed as feminist (the tweet was something about it being creepy for guys to take voyeur shots of women in the bathroom, which is true) (at least, I think it was a tweet. There was something in there about an upvote on a forum that I heard described as Korean feminist Something Awful).
At this point we start wading into a lot of unclear reporting, but the reports as far as I've understood said that the Korean Gamergaters then showed up at Project Moon's office and demanded to speak with staff members. Shortly after this, Project Moon fired the CG artist and at this point this starts getting a lot of attention. The view count on their tweet about the situation has, at time of writing, 31,300,000 views. Typically, their tweets of this sort get somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 to 20,000 views. Many fans of the game were disappointed with the response, to say the least. One of the reports I've heard said that at least one of the voice actors has said she will not be working with Project Moon again on her livestream because of that, though I can't verify that as I don't speak Korean. Most of this happened pretty late at night, sometime around 11 PM, so it took a bit before the story developed any more. Their response led to a lot of backlash. As far as I've heard, the people who were incensed by Project Moon's decision to cave to the incels promptly raised the funds to hire at least two protest vans (I don't fully understand it. Something about vans that get rented out to let people yell from a megaphone and have a moving billboard while driving around? Something like that). Additionally, the unions caught wind of it and it's looking like the way Project Moon handled the firing may have been illegal.
There's a lot going on here, and I'll write more when I catch word of it since it seems like the English-language outlets I've been seeing have mostly been focusing on the fan outrage part of it without really getting into the more cultural parts of the story or covering the labor aspect of it. And, to be fair, the fan backlash is pretty immense. Prominent fan artists have said they won't be covering it anymore. All the English-language Project Moon communities besides the Steam forums are in lockdown after the Korean antifeminists (I'm using antifeminist, incel, and Gamergater interchangably since the overlap is a circle) started spreading misinformation and lies everywhere while laughing about how stupid and gullible the Westerners are on their Korean-language forums as though we can't just go there and see them saying that. Anecdotally, the people in the gacha circles I hang out in are absolutely livid and they all seem like they're planning on dropping Limbus Company over this, which is a pretty reasonable response. I've dropped better games for worse reasons myself.
Regrettably, I don't have a play log, since I stopped playing during the Bongy Chicken event because it was a bit too grindy in a way that took up a bit too much active time, and that was before I went and made this website. I was planning on checking back in later after some more of the game's kinks had been ironed out, maybe after they added some kind of auto mode or sweeps for the mirror dungeons and event dungeons, though the situation described above isn't helping things too much.
