While I agree in principle you will never catch 100% of the bugs pre-launch, has there ever been a game that didnt need at least a few patches in the last 20 years?

Id be keen to read the exact wording of the clause “Dont say anything negative” and “dont say anything negative without talking to us first” are very different statements. I can understand the devs wanting a chance to say “Yep, we know about that and it will be fixed pre-launch” or “Ill put in a ticket to get that looked at ASAP” to the playtesters before they trash the game publicly.

Its also a playtest.

I’ll tell anyone who will listen not to buy a car thats been developed on a new platform for at least 3 years to give them time to find faults in the design in real world conditions. If your playtesting or in early access you are literally playing a prototype, a bunch of content creators spouting off about how its a buggy mess could put a stink on the whole project that people will remember even if its perfectly polished by launch.

Yeah, I’m just smaht enough to know I’m too dumb for that much responsibility.

While I do agree, Id say the counterpoint would be that putting Terren out front when all this happened under Linus’s watch could have come across as disingenuous.

“Heres our new lightning rod, yell at him” sort of thing. I very much think they are in a no win scenario with most of this.

The whole “Trust me bro” thing comes from when they released their backpacks. They had issues with some of the zippers and people wanted to know what the warranty was. Linus said they didnt explicitly have one but that he would look after anyone with issues. When people got a bit rightly pissed about this, he got a bit defensive. “Trust me bro” sprung up as a meme out of that whole saga.

I honestly believe that Linus is a well intentioned dumbass. He likes his people and believes that everyone can just get along and that nobody would harass another employee seriously. He knows that the mistakes are just honest mistakes which is why he gets so defensive, take the whole “trust me bro” thing… I think it never occurred to him to fuck his customers over which is why he didnt handle it well.

He doesnt believe his employees need a union because I dont know about you but if I owned a company Id hope that my people felt looked after well enough that they didnt feel like they needed one either.

But that kind of attitude just doesnt work with so damn many people, he should have hired a full time HR manager YEARS ago, as well as the company lawyer on staff. He SHOULD NOT be doing the WAN show, or if he does it should be on a 5 minute tape delay with someone from legal and hr present.

The reason why so much bullshit corporate structure exists is to largely protect the company from itself.

Linus is the founder, his name is on the buildings, he was CEO at the time of all this shit, he is the cheif on camera personality and he is the majority shareholder. Of course he would be in the video.

Hiring Terren was the smartest thing he could have done, he probably should have gotten someone who understands this shit onboard a long time ago. Even if they were subordinate to him.

Its unlikely, but not impossible and when you’re dealing with preproduction prototypes you are holding someone elses valuable proprietary information, which in the case of this waterblock is unlikely to be something thats worth copying as its a high cost low margin niche product. But someone could.

Its not like it was just expensive or just someone elses property. It was someone elses one of a kind proprietary design prototype, they knew this and they STILL couldnt show the proper care and responsibility. Thats why this admittedly unlikely edge case is a big deal.

I didnt see anywhere that it was the “only” prototype. I believe it was their most complete or their pre-production prototype.

So likely a hand machined and finished item as opposed to something made with production tooling or in batches to reduce manufacturing cost. Something that could also be sent to reviewers as its essentially what the finished product will be. So not only are they out their best prototype, but the opportunity cost and the potential that someone like EK could have bought it and reverse engineered it to release a competing product with little to no R&D cost.