Amir Satvat said he’s received “countless” hateful message since winning the inaugural “Game Changers” award at this year’s Game Awards.
This year’s Game Awards had its regular categories though it had a new “Game Changers” award which Satvat won, after which he gave a tearful, heart-filled message about industry layoffs and trying to help those developers.
Soon after the show ended and people started digesting the winners and announcements, online users started noticing that Satvat’s current employer, Tencent, wasn’t mentioned with his introduction.
It’s also worth mentioning his introduction included a monologue from host Geoff Keighly and a video that portrayed him as a nobody that just wanted to help the industry with his YouTube channel.
Here’s the clip from Satvat’s intro and award:
Endless speculation began as users started questioning why the Business Development Director at a massive publisher like Tencent was being honored as a folk hero for helping those affected by massive publisher layoffs, or why his big corporate employer wasn’t mentioned. That speculation led to lots of messages directed at Satvat, a portion of which he says was hateful.
“Over the past four days, I have received countless hateful messages targeting me personally, alongside hundreds more on YouTube and Twitter,” Satvat said. “People have made disturbing comments about my family – I am only not sharing those comments because they are disgusting, but I will share some other sample comments.”
He added, “My wife and me have been targeted with anti-Semitic slurs. Several videos mocked my comments suggesting I sounded autistic – riffing on it for their audience’s amusement.”
Satvat noted his gig at Tencent started after his work running a games community dedicated to helping those laid off to find work elsewhere in the industry. He claims to have put in over 2000 hours into this group to help those affected by the seemingly endless games industry layoffs.
“This omission has somehow fueled bizarre conspiracy theories – claims that I’m a ‘Tencent agent’ or a ‘Tencent plant’ exploiting our community, or that I’m responsible for job losses and therefore a fraud,” Satvat said. “I started this community while working at Amazon BEFORE I ever joined Tencent. I started the community November 2022. I didn’t start at Tencent until August 2023. Our community has absolutely nothing to do with Tencent. Or Amazon.”
Some speculation pointed to an older article where Satvat talked up his role with Level Infinite, a publishing arm of Tencent, suggesting he worked on mergers – a common cause of layoffs down the line.
“I didn’t / don’t work on mergers and acquisitions at Tencent or Amazon,” Satvat clarified. “This stems from one innocent, erroneous mention of what I do in a Level Infinite article, since corrected to show I only work on investments.”
It’s worth noting that a good amount of criticism and speculation also came from how Game Awards host Geoff Keighley touched on the delicate subject of industry layoffs after repeatedly saying it’s been a great year for the games industry.
“The sad reality is that the over the past few years the gaming industry has suffered significant and unprecedented industry-wide layoffs,” Keighley said. “Those affect the games we get to play and even more importantly the people who make the games we love.”
He added, “We can debate and certainly disagree with the reasons why and honestly as a show we’ve kind of struggled with how to address these topics in a constructive way.”
There’s also another thing not mentioned publicly that a lot of netizens are concerned about – the attempt by Keighley to trademark the phrase “Game Awards,” which would mean no one else would be able to legally use those words with their own game awards shows.
