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[Gamnesia]Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Was Fooled by a Kaz Hirai Parody Account for Months

deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
Kaz Hirai has served as President and CEO of Sony since 2012, but his tenure will soon be over. With less than a week left before Kaz turns the company over to its next leader, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford decided to make a last-ditch effort to try to convince Sony to be more open on the subject of cross-play with Xbox. Unfortunately, Pitchford's request was directed to a parody account.

Twitter user @KazHiraiCEO has been amusing gamers for years with his antics, and he's acquired a following of over 120,000. One of these followers is Pitchford, who has been following the account for months and "thinking Kaz is so much cooler than I actually thought he was." A quick glance at the account's bio shows the phrase "PARODY ACCOUNT" in unmissable all-caps. Whoops.

With the real Kaz stepping down, the fake Kaz will follow soon. The parody account recently announced plans to wind down in June, but not before doing some good. The account is currently raising money for Special Effect, a "UK-based charity that's levelling the playing field for gamers with disabilities!"
kaz_so_cool__large.png

https://www.gamnesia.com/news/gearb...s-fooled-by-a-kaz-hirai-parody-account-for-mo
What a time to be alive

Riiiiidge Racer me if old
 
I love Randy Pitchford, he's an example of many things that I hate in the games industry. This is the man who thought Aliens Colonial Marines is a good game. He also said Duke Nukem Forever is, awesome. Two games that should have been amazing, both completely butchered and for this guy in particular, he's the biggest fan of both games. I mean he has to be right, his companies name is plastered all over them and they both ended up in lawsuits in some way, shape or form and Gearbox were very questionable ethically on both occasions.

This on the other hand is a whole new level for Randy. As reported elsewhere, and I am probably a little LTTP, he mistook the Kaz Hirai CEO fake comedy account for the actual man himself and copped a plea for Sony to back down on cross play and 'Unite' gamer's.

See the event here.

I can't believe that we could possibly one up former hyperbole comments and go a level further. I would face palm but... you know. I've had enough hand prints on my head from previous Randy related incidents so I'll leave this here in case you hadn't seen it yet.
 

Pejo

Member
Twitter's blocked at work, can somebody screencap it or something?

Also, obligatory:

DB0XGk2XUAIViWT.jpg
 
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Ridcully

Member
I think ol' Randy might be losing it: he failed to recognise a parody account and couldn't coherently respond to the statement it made. "You need to work together", indeed.
 

Battlechili

Banned
While hilarious, its an easy mistake. People mistook the spoof accounts "officially" announcing Spyro remakes for being real, so having this mixup is understandable.
Also while Duke Nukem Forever is terrible imo, I think his optimism is refreshing.
 
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Dubloon7

Banned
I think ol' Randy might be losing it: he failed to recognise a parody account and couldn't coherently respond to the statement it made. "You need to work together", indeed.
AND he insulted the REAL Kaz Hirai in his response. this douche needs to go!
 
At least Pitchford owned up to that mistake. Now if only he'd take such a humble attitude with some of his other mistakes. I'm just about always willing to forgive people who say they're sorry.
 

OH-MyCar

Member
At least he didn't RT a fake Bill Murray stealing jokes from r/ShowerThoughts?

That's rough, though. I'd love to see crossplay happen but asking Sony and MS to team up on this? Against what distractions? Movies? What? That was a tweet from a high schooler.
 
Sadly, it's a product of our media world where we have to "instant react" to stuff before we get the details. He should know by now to not believe anything from Twitter at face value.

"Kaz's" tweet after that was amazing. A nice Jab


GEclSi1.jpg


I assume we'll get one last "RRRIDDDGGGEE RAAACEEER" before he goes.
 

Dunki

Member
IS that the guy who did sing some stupid ass anti gamergate song at some PAX? Always knew he was stupid^^
 

jadedm17

Member
It's amusing people still think Playstation will ever agree to playing nice with Xbox... Yea, cool, I'd love it, *as a consumer*.... But as the industry leader 2:1 on Xbox what does Sony have to gain? They're companies, not our friends; No cross-play makes complete sense to me and I don't really fault them.
 

Speedwagon

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. Yabuki turned off voice chat in Mario Kart races. True artists of their time.
"a". I think you mean, "the" kaz hirai parody account. Probably thought it was real since Kaz Hirai showed the tweets at that one presentation.
 

demigod

Member
It's amusing people still think Playstation will ever agree to playing nice with Xbox... Yea, cool, I'd love it, *as a consumer*.... But as the industry leader 2:1 on Xbox what does Sony have to gain? They're companies, not our friends; No cross-play makes complete sense to me and I don't really fault them.

I don’t care for cross platform play but since microsoft forces people on other platforms to sign into live they can go eff themselves.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
It's amusing people still think Playstation will ever agree to playing nice with Xbox... Yea, cool, I'd love it, *as a consumer*.... But as the industry leader 2:1 on Xbox what does Sony have to gain? They're companies, not our friends; No cross-play makes complete sense to me and I don't really fault them.

Especially when you consider that it was the opposite way during the 360 and PS3 days.
 

nowhat

Member
Especially when you consider that it was the opposite way during the 360 and PS3 days.
This is often forgotten. Companies are not altruistic by nature. Would it be nice that we could all sing Kumbaya together? Sure, but I'd also like a pony with that.
 

Shifty

Member
New article i read a couple weeks ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if ms tried to pull something funny.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.bu...one-sony-microsoft-crossplay-explained-2018-3
As far as I can tell, live sign-in is only for Minecraft. That's the 'cloud' they're using to store all of the persistent user data, so it makes sense in that case.

For your average cross-play game, the developers' servers act as a middle-man and abstract out all of the platform-specific stuff, so a live login shouldn't be needed.

That said, MS is the company that swore up and down that they'd do right by PC and ended up delivering the windows store, so level of bullshit is truly off the table...
 
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