Since then, the company has issued an apology saying that they did not do their "proper due diligence to understand the history and the controversy of the site." They're full of shit.

A bit earlier today, THQ Nordic's PR team of Philipp Brock and Reinhard Pollice thought it would be a grand idea to host a Q&A (otherwise known as an "Ask Me Anything" or AMA) on 8chan. For those happily unaware, 8chan has been involved in multiple instances of child abuse, child exploitation, swatting, GamerGate, white supremacy, doxxing, and more. It has been delisted from search engines such as Google due to their content. Think of that site as a message board similar to 4chan that is made up of people banned by 4chan or thought that 4chan didn't allow them to be as racist, inflammatory, or as disgusting as they wanted to be. Imagine being too terrible of a person even for 4chan.

Around 12:30PM (ET) THQ Nordic put up a tweet that announced today's AMA on 8chan. The tweet, which is actually still live despite a weak apology being issued, can be found below in image form.


THQ AMA 8chan

After being announced, it was assumed that someone had hacked THQ's Twitter account. There remained a shred of doubt even as Philipp and Reinhard began answering questions on the site. One commenter on the site asked THQ not to appeal to the "SocJus crowd," to which Brock said "thanks! We'll try to stay that way." Other questions included responses that seemed to fit in line with people who knew exactly who their audience was and who they were responding to.

Some samples of their Q&A can be found below.


The notion that they were hacked remained even as they produced a follow-up tweet to their initial AMA announcement. In this one, they thanked "Mark" for setting it up for them and for helping to take care of "the nasty stuff." You can see that in the image above already.

It took them two hours to respond to the overwhelming backlash from pretty much everyone that isn't a degenerate. Three tweets were made by Philipp Brock about how he failed to do his "due diligence" to do even a simple Google search of a place he agreed to host an AMA on. Again, you can see those tweets in the responses below or see them on Twitter directly if they are still up by the time you read this.

"I personally agreed to this AMA without doing my proper due diligence to understand the history and the controversy of the site. I do not condone child pornography, white supremacy, or racism in any shape or form.

"I am terribly sorry for the short-sightedness of my (!) decision, and promise to be far more vigorous in my assessment of these activities in the future.

"This was not about being edgy, this blew up and I very much regret to have done it in the first place." Philipp Brock, PR & Marketing Director THQ Nordic GmbH (Vienna, Austria)
Except for the fact that this is a real bullshit excuse in an age where searching for something takes literally seconds. Even looking at the site's Wikipedia entry would quickly provide an ever growing list of red flag controversies associated with the site. You don't even have to read anything beyond Wikipedia's table of contents for that entry to determine that it's not a good idea. Anybody with even half a brain would have done so, and you would think that someone who is in charge of PR for a multi-million dollar company would especially take the time to do so. Philipp's excuse falters even harder when you take note of some of the responses given in the 8chan AMA. It then hits rock bottom given some of the Twitter "likes" that were issued from the official THQ Twitter handle.



THQ Nordic is a company that handles the publishing rights and promotion for hundreds of different games from dozens of studios. They have been the publisher for games based on Nickelodeon franchises, you know, games that are made for and marketed to children.

They screwed up royally with this one I'm really not buying the notion that they "didn't know" what they were doing.