[Serious - TW: Sexual Assault] Conor McGregor (The Disruptor) verdict and presence in the game

Hitman: World of Assassination
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Here’s my two cents:

Leave the DLC in for those of us who bought it, but remove it as a purchasable item going forward; do not run The Disruptor as an ET again; remove the end cutscene so that the character is definitively dead and not implying a return; issue an official public apology for including such a controversial figure despite warnings from players and just generally taking a risk with someone who might have been guilty of the things they were accused of before they were even added to the game; make wiser casting choices in the future and listen to fans if they tell you to avoid certain figures.

Decent enough middle ground while edging more toward what we expect of the company going forward.

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I think this is the most sensible option. I think it’s highly likely, as this story gains momentum, IOI will quietly remove the Disrupter from the game store and he obviously wouldn’t be included in future ET reruns. To be honest, I can’t see them removing the DLC for players who already have the DLC on their consoles etc. Plus, I don’t want to loose the hot tub from the Safehouse, so I hope that’s the case. :rofl:

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Actually I think they can remove the DLC even if we paid for it as long as they give us the next DLC free. Even better if this can be done at Conor McGregor’s expense.

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I’m wondering if anyone who bought the DLCs will now not want material related to him in their game. But if IOI outright removes it, would they issue refunds or offer alternative material to compensate? :thinking: Or maybe remove for anyone that asks instead of removing for all.

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They can; I’m saying don’t. It’s not in support of him, I really don’t even like the ET itself as I’ve recently commented in its thread. But, I don’t like the idea of giving entertainment companies the go-ahead that they can permanently remove content, even when it’s controversial material. Better to learn from the mistake and just not repeat it, or just be responsible and not make it in the first place, rather than take things away, especially things we’ve paid for, even if they’re willing to refund us and they’re things we don’t really like that much anyway.

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call me unempathetic or wtv but i really don’t see why this matters, it doesn’t affect any of us unless you actively want it to

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That is a tight and complicated situation indeed :grimacing:

I don’t know why they put him up in the game at first knowing that could eventually happen in the future :thinking:

But now that he is in, with lots of stuff ingame attached to him (mission, DLC pack, etc.), i think it would be a hard job to remove/change everything that has already been brought ingame :hammer_and_wrench:

Personally i don’t really care of character background and focus more on the content and mission itself, and it somehow delivered :+1:

Still, that’s an ankward situation and maybe in the future they will try to avoid such scandals?

That would be better for everyone involved i guess :person_shrugging:

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i empathize with the victim and i can’t imagine what she’s going through but im too far removed from this situation for it to matter to me, even if IO came out and said something they aren’t doing it because they actually care for the victim. They’re a company and their objective is to make money, its just damage control and their statement wouldn’t actually mean anything

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Given IO’s “amazing” communication this past year, I expect them to just ignore the controversy entirely. Maybe quietly stop rerunning The Disruptor as an ET in the future when they rerun the other Celeb ETs, but nothing more.

Though maybe if they had cared more about Hitman this year instead of largely moving on from it, they would have realized it would be a mistake adding a guy having active accusations of SA into the game. Thousands of other celebrities who would also bring new eyes to the game don’t have that kind of controversy, yet they chose Conor over any of those.

Here’s hoping The Splitter’s celebrity doesn’t have an actual criminal past!

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If they’re a celebrity, chances are they do, even if it hasn’t been reported yet. Nature of the craft, it seems, sadly.

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That’s been true for longer than videogames were a thing; Fantasia comes to mind, where Disney removed racial stereotypes from it (they did keep the topless fauns though…), because times changed and people found it extremely offensive. They still have an enforced warning in front of it, as do many of the older WB cartoons; they too engaged in Blackface and racial stereotypes, so it’s not like Disney or WB are trying to erase their racist past either; they’ve outright admitted it was not, and never was, acceptable, but edited it to make it more palatable while still being true to the original.

And I’m fairly sure the original of that sort of thing can be found on the Internet Archive.

There is a balance between making it acceptable for modern audiences and not desecrating the past here, and I feel like going so hard in one direction is just not that helpful. I don’t think people are going to forget the past because it’s not in the game (if nothing else, I’ll make sure they won’t). It’s the same excuse I heard people on Twitter say when 2016 and 2 were delisted. Like…no…2016 and 2 are still possible to download if you already had it, and even if you don’t, the games are well-documented by nerds like myself on both TV Tropes, Fandom Wiki and Wikipedia. It being removed from sale does not mean it is lost to time, that is such a jump to conclusions.

Hell, we can archive H3 ourselves and remake it; Steam has repositories for older versions of all their games, after all, so it’ll never be truly gone. I still have a partial copy of the CTT on my computer.

To use a Hitman example, @AnthonyFuller ported TS6 from the PS4 version of 2016, despite being removed content due to licensing issues. That got ported over eight months later, and I am certain IO saw this mod and decided to kick things into gear officially, either out of embarrassment or due to realising that it might be beneficial to do so. They saved their content.

This is a complicated subject that doesn’t have an adequately clean answer, for either side I might add. I know that this is not going to be a satisfying answer to everyone here, but it’s worth mentioning the complexities of the debate here. Reality is messy, and more often than you might think, it clashes with fiction.

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If IO doesn’t end the current run The Disruptor early in the next couple of days, it will be pretty telling of what they’re planning to do regarding this tbh. Whether its reacting or just burying their head in the sand.

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I don’t think IOI should be concerned with legal matters and it would be foolish to remove content just because an actor is involved in issues unrelated to his work on Hitman. Enough with this moralism!

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This was a civil case. She has been awarded compensation because the jury was convinced on the balance of probability (not the higher standard of beyond all reasonable doubt), that her claim(s) were valid. McGregor is not going to jail because this was not criminal court.

Should IOI (or in fact, any other games company) eat a loss on the basis of a civil trial? This is also potentially two-fold since we don’t know if pulling the whole ET would merely be a loss of future sales, or also make them liable to pay McGregor for lost revenue if they did pull it (I suspect it would) meaning that even by pulling the DLC, IOI gets its pockets pinched by McGregor anyway.

I would expect that had it actually been a criminal trial, IOI would have clear-cut recourse to immediately removing the content. Not to say that there isn’t necessarily an argument of bringing disrepute to the game - considering this, again, was a civil case, IOI would almost certainly need to litigate it before taking any sort of action to remove the DLC.

Personally, I found his inclusion distasteful to begin with, but that ship has sailed and it bears considering exactly who stands to lose from attempting to nix the ET at this point.

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I’m not sure why this comment comes off as downplaying the issue at hand, but that’s how it reads to me. Civil case or criminal case, it doesn’t matter, Conor did something very nasty to put it mildly, and has had an effect on his victim, who sought to seek damages (understandably so), and won that case. Justice has been served, but the court of public opinion is still going to rage on for a while yet. In my opinion, it being a civil case instead of criminal case, makes no difference during the trial as to what IO would do.

The point of a trial is that everything is uncertain until the verdict; innocent until proven otherwise. It doesn’t matter if we know if one party is in the wrong or not (or rather going off of gut feelings and past records); only the courts can decide that, not Twitter or this forum. It’s why companies mostly react after the decision made by the courts, not before, as it could come off as jumping the gun and offend people because action was not needed. Silence is not always bad, but it cannot last forever either.

We, the audience, lost the moment this ET was announced. We knew him by reputation, and we could make a fairly good guess that history would repeat itself. Which it did, to pretty much no-one’s surprise here. This whole incident only proves that this deal shouldn’t have happened. Trying to make it sound like removing the ET would be a bad solution (which is the tone I get from your wording) seems like trying to keep something you know is controversial in the game for your own amusement.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. It’s been a long few hours

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Pretty much what I’m saying, and those examples are, well, good examples of such. It shouldn’t be entirely removed from those who have already been exposed to it, but it should be made that anyone new coming in can’t access it, at least not in the publicly accessible version of the game. The reasons why can be made clear through a disclaimer, or members of the fanbase can fill them in, and if it truly matters to them, they use other people’s mod of the game - I guess the equivalent of a “bootlegged copy, in this case? - to do so.

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It may not matter to you, but it matters to courts and has a tangible effect on contracts.

If you hadn’t noticed, the news reports are careful not to call McGregor a rapist for this very reason.

Many would say that Justice being served would see him criminally convicted. Instead, she has, on paper, a 250K payout that may not survive the appeals process unscathed.

I am not minimising what he is alleged to have done, I am pointing out that it’s very likely McGregor would be able to hold IOI liable for an estimate of what he would have earned if they pull the content.

The net effect being that McGregor still gets his money, now at IOI’s expense.

If you dislike McGregor, don’t buy the DLC and encourage others not to do so.

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I doubt McGregor earns anything from the DLC sales, it’s more likely there was some upfront payment to him for his appearance in the game (like any voice actor would get) so he wouldn’t lose anything if IOI decided to phase out the Disruptor (although it still might not be possible for them because of contract stipulations).

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i don’t think we can make the assumption he doesn’t earn a percentage of the sales, we have no way knowing for sure

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