Cliff Bleszinski comments on Mark Rein’s indie panel diss

The reactions regarding Mark Rein’s heckling adventures at the Develop Conference last week keeps coming. Earlier, we reported on Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney offering an apology to developer Cliff Harris in behalf of Rein. This time, it’s Cliff Bleszinski giving his own two cents.

Commenting on the whole brouhaha surrounding his colleageu, Bleszinski, himself no stranger to controversy, tweeted:

“I haven’t spoken with Mark today, but I’d wager he thought the comment was silly that only indy devs reply or interact to consumers.”

If you’re still wondering what the ranting blog post of Harris contained, we’ve posted a significant portion of it here.

According to the accounts of Harris, dev and owner of Positech Games, a one-man indie dev team:

“And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically, I started making the point, and Mark [Morris, Introversion] was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of, ‘One guy? Who cares, that’s a waste of time.’ He then started to lecture us on how that’s a silly way to do it.

I’m 95% sure that all four of us in the panel thought ‘what the f***?’ as well as ‘who is this guy?’, compounded by Robin [Lacey, Beatnik], asking him if he worked in marketing.

Anyway… it turned out this guy was Mark Rein from Epic, although he seemed to assume everyone within earshot knew exactly who he was, and why he must obviously be right. I got the impression he was there to laugh at the little guys, or just to inform us how we are all wrong.”

The conclusion of this blog post was succinct and sweet: “Mark Rein is a jerk.”

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