Steve Gaynor (probably best known for his work on ‘Minerva’s Den’ from BioShock 2) and the Fullbright Company will no longer be showing Gone Home at the PAX Prime ‘Indie Megabooth.’ In a statement on their website, the developers explain that “we cannot support Jerry [Holkins], Mike [Krahulik], and their organization by participating in this event.”
The team has taken ethical issue with a number of statements and business stances taken by the Penny Arcade pair over the past year or so, including paid internships and attitudes towards transgender people. After internal discussions, Fullbright has concluded:
We are a four-person team. Two of us are women and one of us is gay. Gone Home deals in part with LGBT issues. This stuff is important to us, on a lot of different levels. And Penny Arcade is not an entity that we feel welcomed by or comfortable operating alongside.
We wish all the best to the organizers and participants in the Indie Megabooth, as we really do believe that it is an incredibly positive force for indie games and video games in general.
We just wish it weren’t at PAX.
You can read the full statement and reasoning at Fullbright’s site. Thanks to NeoGaf for originally spotting this.
Gone Home is an exploratory, narrative-led indie title, set in 1995. It was an Independent Games Festival 2013 finalist for “excellence in narrative.”
