SNK, the developers behind the popular game Samurai Shodown, has apologized for and deleted a series of tweets that were inappropriate for a major gaming company's Twitter.
While celebrating the release of Iroha, the latest DLC character to the game, the official Samurai Shodown Twitter account retweeted a number of screenshots from her release trailer. These screenshots weren't focused on gameplay, but on the characters butt, some of which were accompanied with inappropriate messages.
Samurai Shodown has always had the reputation for being a raunchy game, just take a look at the trailer for the DLC character Mina Majikina. However, many fans felt the tweets took things too far. Instead of highlighting the unique fighting style of Iroha, Samurai Shodown's account chose to objectify the character, presenting her as just something for fans to drool over.
These tweets made many fans of the series uncomfortable, especially female fans. To many, it felt like yet another incident of blatant sexism in the gaming industry, like the time popular streamer Ninja explained why he wouldn't play with women on stream.
Responding to the backlash, SNK deleted the tweets, and put out a new one saying the previous posts had "been deemed inappropriate and offensive to members of our community." They asked that fans accept their "sincerest apologies." While this apology was enough for some, others called on the company to do more, pointing out that women in esports are often paid less than men in similar positions.
While the apology and the deletion of the tweets should have been the end of the story, there was backlash to the backlash. Fans who long for causal misogyny to be more acceptable in mainstream gaming culture have turned this into their latest rallying cry against "SJW ideology" in gaming.
This small but loud subsection of gamers is upset that female and POC points of view are starting to see more representation in gaming. One only has to look as far as one Escape from Tarkov developer's comments on women to see that feelings like this remain all too common in the gaming community.
Samurai Shodown is available for PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One, and Stadia.