For as long as video games have been around, console wars have existed and are perhaps fought as strongly as ever due to social media and the ease of sparking a debate or argument with fellow gamers. While most of us find it amusing to watch unfold, some people are deep in the trenches and live and die by their chosen gaming platform.
It isn’t unusual for one side of the war to call for the cancelation or firing of people in the gaming industry based on which video games they give high or low review scores, with it recently happening with the launch of Starfield which saw one gamer call for many top gaming journalists to be fired for enjoying the game, don’t worry we have a good laugh about it. Unfortunately, this console war also affects the people who make the games as they too face online attacks for simply liking video games.
Popular gaming YouTuber Alanah Pearce recently came under fire by a small section of the PlayStation fandom for playing and promoting Starfield, an Xbox exclusive that was ripped away from the grasp of PlayStation 5 owners following the acquisition of Bethesda by Microsoft in 2021. The calls by these individuals for Alanah Pearce to be fired stem from her being one of the writers of the Sony-exclusive God of War Ragnarok.
In a video posted to her YouTube channel, Alanah Pearce goes over the post on X and how “absurd” it is, also noting that she had a 10-minute conversation with the creative director of God of War Ragnarok, Cory Barlog, about how they are enjoying Starfield. He was one of the people the poster tagged to try and get her fired.
It is no secret that the console wars have raged on in the minds of some gamers since the early days of video gaming, with gamers in the 90s arguing about whether Nintendo‘s SNES or Sega’s Genesis was the best brand before including the likes of Sony’s PlayStation later in the decade. This still happens today with it largely being between the PlayStation and Xbox as they are two competitors which largely share a similar library outside of exclusive titles. However, it is worth noting that this ‘war’ only exists among a very small minority of the gaming community and, as Alanah points out, it doesn’t exist within the industry and many developers jump from company to company throughout the course of their career.
Pearce reiterated, “When a big game comes out and people are excited about it, the whole industry is excited about it. People in the games industry like and care about video games as a whole. The things that you think matters, does not matter.”
Due to Alanah’s successful YouTube channel, which currently has 600,000 subscribers, she has built good relationships with a variety of companies and noted that while working for Microsoft she was gifted a PlayStation 4 by Sony and codes for its latest video games, and now she works for Sony she still works with Microsoft to create content for her channel. One of the more interesting pieces of information from the video is that she is now more restricted when it comes to covering PlayStation games and isn’t allowed to receive any early copies and has to purchase the games herself while having no restrictions to work with Microsoft or Nintendo.
Remember folks, they’re just video games and consoles are just plastic boxes. Enjoy what you want, the console war isn’t real, and it isn’t that serious.
