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Former US Vice President Joe Biden recently shared some inflammatory words for the video game industry, and the big-shot executives running it. More specifically, the presidential hopeful relayed his experience meeting various game developers and other Silicon Valley heads during his tenure at the White House. According to Biden, some of the people he met that day weren’t just “arrogant” and “righteous,” but “little creeps.”
“And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America,” said Biden while speaking to New York Times. “And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people…
“And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the switchboard, just blow it up.”
As you may now, Biden has spoken out about video games in the past, or more specifically, violent video games. In fact, at one point he proposed an additional tax on violent media, including violent games. In other words, it’s not very surprising to hear he has some beef with the people in charge of the rapidly growing industry.
“And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, ‘We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.’ And fortunately I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.. The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree.”
H/T, VG 24/7.