About a few hours ago, Overwatch replied to a recent tweet from entrepreneur Elon Musk about buffing Torbjörn’s turrets.

Hey, @elonmusk. We heard you like rockets… https://t.co/RhmsfOq7Gp pic.twitter.com/dBISoIvsX1

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) October 14, 2020

A harmless tweet, sure, given Overwatch’s popularity, Blizzard’s status quo as a bigwig games maker, and Elon Musk being a world-famous engineer, businessman, and philanthropist. However, that tweet received quite a bit of backlash.

The company that banned people for mentioning Hong Kong is sucking up to the billionaire who denies COVID is a thing worth dealing with because we are in the worst, dumbest timeline https://t.co/ciwv2w7VtT

— Chris Franklin (@Campster) October 14, 2020

Overwatch. I love you. But please don't associate yourself with such filth.

— CapitanAzteca77 (@CapitanAzteca77) October 14, 2020

How about to buff Bolivia with a coup after lithium, with a pint of human rights violation? This was a very bad clout-seeking take imo pic.twitter.com/n4GMiR1Fer

— Allan Mendes (@umceuazul) October 14, 2020

https://twitter.com/otistheg/status/1316197574546726912

Why the hate? Well, it’s less on the actual game and its needed buffs. There’s no way in heck Blizzard will just wreck their carefully-balanced game with nonsense like this. It probably has to do with the following:

-Blizzard has been under a lot of flak due to events involving them censoring Hong Kong and banning Hearthstone players & costers for voicing their opinions regarding the 2019 Hong Kong extradition bill and the subsequent riots.

-Elon Musk, for all that he has done, has some rather interesting (and complicating) views & practices. Like downplaying the severity of COVID-19 this year. And the fact that his company SpaceX is open to selling their tech to weapons companies and to the Pentagon, which means they are fine selling weapons and tools of mass murder to the highest bidder in the grand scheme of things. How does philanthropy work within this context again?

Long story short: it’s the subjects who are conversing with each other on Twitter rather than the tweet itself. It’s a divisive topic, sure, but were it not for all this context, this tweet would just have been harmless as it is. Then again, any publicity is good publicity as far as Blizzard is concerned.