Ion Fury is a throwback shooter, heavily inspired by 90s games like Duke Nukem 3D. The game released for PC earlier this month and has enjoyed a relatively positive response from critics. However, it has found itself the center of controversy, thanks to accusations of transphobic comments by the developers on Discord and offensive text found in-game. It was announced that the offensive jokes would be patched out of Ion Fury, which upset another group of people accusing the game of promoting censorship, and inspiring someone with access to developer Voidpiont's Twitter account to tell people just to pirate the game.
In a since-deleted tweet, someone who was presumably on the Ion Fury development team said, "If you want to pirate it, it's only like 95MB. You should check it out. We worked really hard on it and it's a cool game. F*** politics." This tweet was quickly deleted, but not before it was screenshotted by the Internet, including online publication Game Revolution.
When it was revealed that Ion Fury would patch out the offensive jokes and that the developers had used potentially transphobic comments on Discord, it was also announced that $10,000 of the game's profits would be donated to The Trevor Project, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to LGBTQ suicide prevention. Additionally, publisher 3D Realms made it clear that moving forward, it will make sure that developers it partners with will have to abide by its "zero-tolerance policy" for hate speech.
It remains to be seen how this controversy will impact Ion Fury's sales moving forward. It's unclear how successful the game has been from a financial standpoint, but as mentioned previously, it has earned strong reviews from game critics. Some people may be turned off by the controversy and will pass on the game because of it, whereas others may not be bothered by the controversy at all. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how it sells when it's all said and done.
This isn't the first controversy that's plagued Ion Fury. The game was at the center of a $2 million lawsuit after it was sued by the band Iron Maiden and forced to change its original title, Ion Maiden.
Ion Fury is out now for PC, with a release planned for PS4, Switch, and Xbox One later this year.
Source: Game Revolution