GDQ floor photo taken by Wes “Fish” Chan, used under the purview of CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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Key edits: * Corrected a mistake that GDQ was listed as a non-profit org.
Well, today was certainly an interesting day! On the heels of finalizing an absolutely fantastic Summer Games Done Quick 2026, GDQ immediately followed that up with… a SNK partnership of streams of some popular speedruns of their games. This provoked a nigh all-out brawl on social media, namely Bluesky, where a lot of thoughts and even more feelings were flying around. (If you don’t know why, I’ll talk about that in brief for context shortly.)
I want to call attention to some observations I had as someone with a history of community management while going through a lot of conversations with people today, and how it contributes to the nature of protest and online discourse, what it means to effectively protest or even argue against protest, and maybe even touch on why “it is always that deep”, but first, an explanation of the issue at hand and what transpired with GDQ today.
If you are aware of the events of the day and/or understand why SNK is a currently protested company, I have made the following paragraphs into drop-downs so you can get to the opinion piece quickly.
What did SNK do?
In order to understand why people are upset about GDQ’s partnership, you have to understand why game developer SNK is maligned in many gaming circles right now. Covering this is an article in and of itself, so I am going to give the high-level details and let other writers handle the intricacies past this as they already have.
SNK is largely controlled by the country’s Public Investment Fund known as the Misk Foundation, a NPO that is owned by Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This control is exerted through a majority share of the company through its subsidiary, the Electronic Gaming Development Company. In 2020, this came in the form of a one-third share, not giving them a controlling stake, but two years later, this share was increased to 96.18% alongside SNK’s notification to KOSDAQ that they will be delisting their shares with the intent to be fully owned by them. This is something that bin Salman is doing with a tremendous amount of the gaming industry right now, with its prime example being the acquisition of fighting game community giant EVO.
Well, why is that an actual issue? Unfortunately, the House of Saud and its controller is known for a litany of human rights violations and crimes against humanity up to and including extremely cruel torture, namely recently bin Salman’s direct involvement in the assassination and torture by dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and the House of Saud’s overall approach to capital punishment and torture of its queer citizens. These issues have drawn the ire of several humanitarian aid organizations, ironically including that of GDQ donation affiliate Médecins Sans Frontières. Again, there is a litany of additional information out there about this topic, so I’ll instead move on.
The stream and the protest
For the 30th anniversary of the Metal Slug series on July 12th, SNK partnered with Games Done Quick for a one-day speedrun showcase. This post on Bluesky sparked a tremendous amount of notoriety, racking up 436 quotes at time of writing this to its 62 likes, with an overall largely negative opinion. This was seemingly amplified since the org just came fresh off the end of a very poignant SGDQ year in which MSF and staff were notably critical of events happening in Gaza, and so many long-time GDQ viewers chose to take to the Twitch chat to protest this decision.
General sentiment externally from the volunteer moderation team and some GDQ hosts and regulars in chat was one of general understanding, but with a feeling of tied hands, though I have heard from sources that internally several members were actively vocal on this point. But as with many protests in larger scales, the “front lines”, so to speak, was the main point of external context collapse. Many other viewers were expressing their annoyance at the protest and with those doing so in chat, citing that it was a major disruption to mods and streamers who had nothing to do with the anniversary event. As is common with many of these situations, calls started to be made to handle “harassers” in chat, with tensions quickly rising and consuming nearly all of the conversation actually happening. The moderators had a message they were frequently posting redirecting all complaints to their management via email, and bans were happening presumably based on those who stepped too far out of line, some appearing to be automated based on mention of bin Salman’s specific tortures, such as subtle references to sawing a body apart.
GDQ’s decision
After a while, Games Done Quick chose to end the marathon prematurely, and not long after they took to social media to discuss what transpired.
GDQ handled this by stating they would not accept the funds from the sponsorship or continue to work with them, reinstated their commitment to human rights and inclusivity, and recognized that their partnership conflicted with that. They then went on to apologize to the runners, host, and volunteers that were affected by this, and talked about strengthening their process for evaluating sponsors going forward.
While this seems to have been generally well-received, it definitely cast a light on some of the ownership’s ability to vet their events, with many discussions still happening into the evening regarding this, and that’s where I’ll start weighing in with my own opinions and expertise on this.
A system is what it does
GDQ is uniquely positioned to be the centerpiece of an argument like this right now. As a company that is still seen as largely devoted to amplifying marginalized voices while at the same time being under some degree of fire for their increasing scale lending a very corporate, mass-marketed air to them in recent years, it’s not an understatement to say that they are dealing with some growing pains.
One thing I personally observed by those connected to GDQ in ways in the past, even some of those closer to me, was an immediate defensiveness even prior to GDQ’s reversal on the “harassment of mods and staff.” This is where I want to talk about things like the concept of DARVO from the perspective of community organization, how some people can perform behavior like this subconsciously, the purpose of a protest, and what it means to speak to what I call the “lowest common denominator of an argument.”
The first thing I want to make abundantly clear is this – “the purpose of a system is what it does” applies to not just instances of things like corruption, and:
The purpose of an effective protest action, whether it’s small individual efforts to global, large-scale initiatives, is typically to create discomfort and disruption in a system with the effect of increasing visibility of and reception to a cause, with the overall goal of achieving a specific change or changes by the protested party.
Chatters coming in to speak up about GDQ tying themselves to a regime known for injustice and death are doing this, regardless of their approaches. If we are going to have a discussion in good faith about how to respond to this, we have to come to this agreement first. The issue is not whether or not GDQ truly did or did not know about this beforehand, it is the actual action at hand. With that being said, let’s talk about something I hear a whole lot in other aspects of my life:
“They aren’t helping their cause” – DARVO and counter-protest
“If you harass anyone over [this] you are actively doing harm to yourself and the community,” or, “you are not doing your cause any favors.”
The term “DARVO” is short for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” It is often used as a cudgel against forms of protest to indicate in a social context that the protestors are doing more harm than good in causing discomfort to others, and in many cases it often targets small vocal or otherwise extremist members of a protesting group. If you believe in the power of protest and largely agree with the situation at hand when it comes to its protestors, you cannot abandon your belief of how protest works when all of a sudden it is targeting something that you feel personally strongly about.
I’m not suggesting people should not target the nuance involved in this situation – even now there are people venting anger about GDQ’s response, that there needs to be a mass firing or some other form of flagellation in order to make this situation right, and this goes against the purpose of protest, which is to get results – but I AM suggesting that if you wade into a discussion about protest on the side of “I agree with what is being protested, but these protestors are no good” without clear distinctions, your behavior will always be twisted and used against the people protesting this cause.
The reason this is crucial is simple: Even outside of the people who will use your words to intentionally twist your point against you, we are creatures of emotion, and many of us without the nuance to understand a point will focus on those who were affected by that point most recently, regardless of the topic at hand. This often means that, in the case of something like this if it were to get to a heavy counter-protest situation, the marginalized people protesting against an organization siding with a regime known for deathsquads will ultimately be begrudgingly siding with that regime because a select few innocent people like mods and runners were inconvenienced, not the actual original target of the discussion.
The lowest common denominator
Businesses with any degree of scale get choices in what they do in their day to day, and sometimes those choices are very difficult if, in the frankly very rare case of a business in 2026 that wants to stay socially mindful, they put themselves in a bad situation. GDQ had the ability at any time to pull the stream and recognize what was going on, and they likely did once they made the judgement call that they would stand to lose much more than they did by not doing so, that’s exactly what they did.
Because this and other bad-faith arguments were the hinge pin of a lot of the discourse around these actions, I want to talk about appealing to the “lowest common denominator” of a discourse. I’ve said this a million times in my life lesson posts on Bluesky, but if I can give any experience to people speaking out against things like response to community injustice, it is this: If you speak only to the extremes of an event on your own side of an argument but espouse moderation, you are setting yourself up to be exploited by your opponents.
This applies to so many places in our lives now. The reason so many reasonable people argue with people who seem the most like them are because those people have the capacity to reason! They are not extremists, they are working under their own good nature, but not enough experience! It is the same reason that most people know that trying to convince people duped by low experience or education into keeping abusers in power is actually a far more sensible act than convincing actual abusers in power.
I want to shift over to a different key point to drive this point home: Have you ever heard this before? “This (leftist or marginalized subcommunity) is always just arguing with themselves, how can we trust them if they’re doing this?” While not a guarantee, it’s often exactly because they’re doing this that they are trying to earn that trust, because people with more experience in community outreach know that keeping their people safe is often an inside job!
If you are wanting to speak to true reason when discussing a protest or argument, you must actually speak to it, and recognize that how you do so – especially as someone who contributes to the community you are speaking on – is a reflection of how you actually see the members of that community when the chips finally land.
The skill of argument
So how do we fix this, as members or maybe organizers of community? How do we run this difficult balancing act of understanding but not grouping the extremes of a situation together and preventing our enemies from exploiting us? The answer is simple – especially if we’re talking on social media, we have to constantly be mindful of this, put in thinking traps to make sure our points and goals are clear, and we have to over-explain the issue and address the key difference in the extremism of both sides of a point. In this particular case, at the end of the day here even if you do not agree with how people have handled this incident with GDQ, you have to recognize that the side of that argument was still the one arguing against actual, honest-to-god deathsquads, they just committed the “cardinal sin” of being bad at the skill of argument.
A lot of detractors will love to chime in and say “it’s just video games, it’s really not that deep.” I bristle at this every single time, because not only IS it that deep because it deals with humanity, but it’s actually more deep because the villains at large of this industry know how often this line has been used, and they expect you to roll over because people will find you cringe for it!
Understanding your enemies in a community is a massive key point to understanding the people you don’t agree with inside of it, and if you can’t learn that, you may mean all the good in the world and still be the one to actually hurt your own cause, not the people you think are just less skilled at defending themselves.
Did you like this article? Did it make you think about community management and dispute handling in a different way? I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me an email here or reach out to me on Bluesky and let me know your thoughts, add in your input, give me corrections, anything you’d like.
This is the time that I should mention that I am a trans woman who has organized community specifically in the polyamory and kink scenes since 2009, and since it is extremely hard if not impossible to market these specific things in a resume, if you think your business or a colleague’s would be well served with this kind of insight, I urge you to consider me for paid community organization or ethics consultation positions. I would love to hear from companies that want to still do the right thing in 2026, and you’ll get someone who is eager to ply their knowledge and life’s interest. I also possess a strong multidisciplinary IT, public speaking, B2B sales, and graphic design background outside of this experience, as well as experience as full owner and hirer of both for-profit and non-profit local small businesses.
Thank you so much for reading.
All my love, -L
