It is a widely accepted concept that game influencers will receive compensation for the content they contribute, however when that compensation involves unlimited in-game perks in titles that have a leaderboard, a line has obviously been crossed. This is precisely what happened with Marvel’s “Strike Force”, a mobile gatcha game that has players collecting and powering up different Marvel heroes. The aftermath of this fiasco? A player who goes by the handle Knightlygaming is getting his account removed from the public server after Redditors noticing his unrealistically fast climb to the top of the game’s leaderboards.
When Strike Force developer Foxnet increased the level cap from 55 to 65, Knightlygaming, showcased a fully maxed out team in a video that came out less than two weeks after the update. This lead to a wave of speculation from the community concerning how he was legitimately able to achieve this. Shortly afterwards, Knightlygaming released an emergency video of sorts detailing his relationship with Foxnet. While the original video was taken down from YouTube, you can still see it below.
Essentially, Knightlygaming discloses the fact that he has been working for Foxnet and has thus received in-game perks to help create content for the community. Clearly, he didn’t prepare this video beforehand as his word choice is pretty awful. He notes that he “works for Foxnet” which seems to imply that he is a Foxnet employee. This, however, is not the case, and Foxnet actually wrote a response
The author of that thread, u/aus10w, calls Foxnet out for this ridiculous move, commenting that it was extremely unfair towards players who had actually spent large sums of money to reach the top of the leaderboards. Among several big complaints, the thread also criticizes Foxnet’s lack of communication with players and calls for the company to hire a community director to forward the community’s concerns to management. To add insult to injury, Foxnet’s response didn’t address any issue aside from the one concerning Knightlygaming.
In the end, Foxnet declared that all future content from influencers that were sponsored by the company would be correctly labeled and mentioned in the video. As for Knightlygaming, his account would be deleted from the public server and placed onto a private server where his actions would not affect other players.
Ultimately, this debacle makes one wonder how companies with such bad management and decision making can continue to profit as much as they do. My take on it? Maybe if consumers realized how addicted they were to bad games and had the personal fortitude to ween themselves off of them, the bad companies behind them would crash as they’re supposed to. Based on what’s been making headlines recently, this doesn’t seem like it’ll be happening any time soon.
