I am a gamedev, and at least to us cancel culture became a really serious issue, it even caused a suicide of a famous indie dev after a Twitter mob made his business partners dump him and disavow him.
I believe you, and I didn't mean for my parenthetical question to minimize the suffering of those who do experience it. It seems like it's more prevalent in some circles than others, but I could be wrong. Either way, I don't want anyone lose their job when it isn't warranted.
You call them a "Twitter mob", the game devs call them their customers and fans. If your customers and fans are telling you they'd rather not buy, use, and support your product if they know it's made in part by a known serial sexual assaulter of women, what would you do?
The guy sounded seriously mentally unwell. Maybe if we had better support for mental illness and less stigma around the whole issue, the outcome would have been different. But I find it hard to put blame for his suicide on the people who didn't want to be associated with him after his despicable behavior became known.
If you read more about it, the people accusing him and calling for the game cancellation are NOT the clients of the gamedev. Since I am in that field more or less I know why the distancing from him was necessary, and had nothing to do with the buyers.
The other thing is, the accusation (it was a single one in fact) was flimsy, the accusar have accused a lot of other people over the years and made some weird claims (like claiming she murdered a person in an alleyway)
I said twitter mob because it was a twitter mob, literally, outsied twitter he was not that bashed, it was only on twitter that there was a huge storm of people bashing him, mostly people that weren't going to buy his game in first place.
Maybe we are talking about different incidents then because the one that comes to mind is Alec Holowka, where there were multiple instances of abuse and his own sister believes he did what he's accused of. Those who fired him specifically state it was not because of a "single flimsy accusation", so I guess you're talking about something else?
But in a general sense I don't see why you assume that the "mob" are not customers or fans. How does "cancel culture" even work if the actual customers and fans maintain the same level of sales? What is the mechanism by which public pressure causes a "mob" to exert control over a company's decisions?
Ignore them? People are fickle, and forgetful. They only mob against a company or employer because it works. If everyone just ignored them, they'd stop doing it.
The guys who made Kingdom Come Deliverance were pretty outspoken and brash, and got a -lot- of heat. The game still did fairly well.
