The designer says that the industry is too focused on violence

Apr 22, 2013 16:51 GMT  ·  By

Charles N. Cox, a veteran developer who has worked on such franchises like MAG, SOCOM, and SWAT, says that he will no longer work on first-person shooter titles because he believes the industry is too focused on violence and needs to rethink its priorities.

On his personal blog, the game creator says, “Money isn’t an acceptable stand-in for ethical behavior. Just as legality doesn’t equal morality, so too does profit fail to imply ethical superiority. Great, we’re all making these games. Should we? Did we ever ask?”

Cox says that a chance encounter with an engineer colleague who lied to his little girl about his job, saying that he was working on a hide-and-seek game rather than a shooter, convinced him to renounce the genre.

The developer also acknowledges that the popularity of the genre, seen in titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Battlefield 3, means that developers and publishers will not abandon them.