The Game Awards' first Game Changers recipient responds to "hateful" and "disturbing" comments accusing him of fraud
"This is the 'reward' for two years of service."
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Amir Satvat was the recipient of the first 'Game Changers' award at The Game Awards last week, but has since received "countless hateful messages", "disturbing comments" and antisemitic remarks about his wife.
Satvat received the award for his work helping laid-off employees across the games industry to find new work. The award was host Geoff Keighley's way of addressing the "significant and unprecedented industry-wide layoffs", which he admitted the show struggles to address "in a constructive way".
Satvat has helped to place nearly 3000 people into jobs, and was described at the awards show as "career Santa Claus". Yet since last week, he's been subjected to abuse online due to his current work at Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent.
"Over the past four days, I have received countless hateful messages targeting me personally, alongside hundreds more on YouTube and Twitter," Satvat wrote in a LinkedIn post.
"People have made disturbing comments about my family - I am only not sharing those comments because they are disgusting, but I will share some other sample comments. My wife and me have been targeted with anti-Semitic slurs. Several videos mocked my comments suggesting I sounded autistic - riffing on it for their audience's amusement."
Due to his work as a business development director at Tencent, Satvat has been accused of being some sort of agent or plant exploiting the community, or that he's a fraud, he wrote.
However, he explained his community work began in November 2022 before he started at Tencent in August 2023. Before this he worked for Amazon, but again his community work was separate.
"I didn't / don't work on mergers and acquisitions at Tencent or Amazon," Satvat continued. "This stems from one innocent, erroneous mention of what I do in a Level Infinite article, since corrected to show I only work on investments."
He has also never laid employees off.
"They simply didn't mention Tencent at TGA because it had nothing to do with this community and they wanted to focus on how we drove this ourselves," he said.
"I've been accused of creating 'jail-worthy fraud' and mocked for 'just making one spreadsheet people enter info into', usually by people who spent all of eight seconds looking at our site with no understanding of the work we do or the impact we've had. We have 15 resources across five different resource homes and there is a lot of depth to our community, as any of you who have used it know."
He surmised: "This can happen to you too when you sacrifice over 2,000 hours of your time to help the industry - this is the 'reward' for two years of service."
Finishing the post, he said he would now "return to our mission of positive, public service".
Astro Bot won multiple awards on the night, including Game of the Year, as did Balatro and Metaphor: ReFantazio. Black Myth: Wukong producer and Game Science CEO Feng Ji posted a long comment on his disappointment at the game not winning the top prize, despite taking home Best Action Game and the Players' Voice award.