Elias Toufexis, the actor best known for playing Adam Jensen in the Deus Ex series, has strongly criticized the growing online trend of people wanting video games to fail. Speaking about the toxic culture around review-bombing and hate campaigns, he said, “Why are you spending hours doing this … How do you hope something fails?”
The actor shared his thoughts in a recent interview with PC Gamer at GDC. According to Toufexis, he often has to remind himself to stop reading toxic comments on X (formerly Twitter). He stated, “Life is so short, man. Just stop tweeting memes under things for six hours.”
Recently, we have seen several games fail or shut down shortly after release, including titles like Highguard and Concord. Whenever something like this happens, social media quickly fills with people celebrating the failure, almost as if they enjoy watching these projects fall apart without thinking about the developers who spent years working on them. Marathon has also become a target of this kind of hate since its reveal. Toufexis, who voices one of the runners in the game, said he has personally seen many negative comments online.
He explained, “I saw some guy like, I don’t want to get into specifics, but they’re just like, ‘I hope Bungie fails because of the woke leftist ideology.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m working with four white guys and two white women. I don’t understand this. Where are you getting this?’” Toufexis said the internet discussions around games are becoming annoying. He mentioned that this is not the first time he has seen this kind of reaction either, mentioning that he also faced similar comments and hate during projects like Starfield and Star Trek: Discovery.
“Critique the game? Critique my work? Totally acceptable. But there’s people that go on Twitter and post memes: ‘This is Concord 2, this is Concord 2.’ Why are you spending hours doing this … How do you hope something fails?” he added. The actor also made it clear that he fully accepts criticism and honest feedback about games or his acting work. What he does not understand is why some people want entire projects to fail and hundreds of developers to lose their jobs.
In other news, Marathon is set to receive support for “many years,” despite mixed player feedback and sales that reportedly fell short of Sony’s expectations.
