Games Done Quick Cancels Their SNK Sponsor Deal After Heavy Backlash

Last week saw another iteration of Summer Games Done Quick, with dozens of games getting completed in literal record times.

While GDQ is overtly focused on speedrunning, it has been a bit of a community event where people can come together and hang out while celebrating the hobby and our favorite games.

It's somewhat important to keep this in mind, because when your event depends on people, and those people care deeply about the event, it's going to be harder to pull off any bag chasing maneuvers or corporate takeovers.

It's also the sort of event where the average fan is going to be fairly "plugged in," since both spectating and participating in a speedrunning event implies a certain level of enthusiasm about gaming.

As such, when GDQ announced that one of the runs will be sponsored by SNK, it was met with some very negative reactions. Not because of SNK itself, but rather because of who currently owns SNK.

This should come as no surprise to people who saw the controversy around the new Fatal Fury, althrough in this case there was much less hesitation and it only took a few hours before GDQ in no no uncertain terms cancelled the sponsorship and promised to vet the sponsors from now on.

This decision was still met with residual lashback from different sides. On one side, some people might be a bit callous after years of questionable corporate moves, and think that GDQ never should've made the mistake to begin with.

Even though it's true to some extent, it seems harsh to not give any grace to an event that has been constantly donating millions to prevent cancer foundation, and has consistently shows that they do care about people and want to do what's best.

On the other hand, people who do watch GDQ seem fairly upset about the sponsorship getting cancelled. They want the event to be as apolitical impossible, instead of taking a radical stance like "killing journalists is wrong," or "humans deserve human rights."