He's right to an extent. This is something every developer has to deal with. You have to look the average amount of unwarranted hate that games get, and ignore that same amount of hate yourself, discarding it as "margin of bullshit." The problem that Pitchford doesn't seem to get is that even after that, there's still a TON of legitimately warranted negativity being pointed at Duke Nukem Forever and especially at Aliens: Colonial Marines.
In statistics, you have to ignore everything that falls within the margin of error, and worry about what's left. But that only works if you have a sane idea of what that margin is. If 98% of study participants report your headache medicine reduced or removed their headaches, you can safely say it works. If only 2% report it helped, you cannot, I repeat, CANNOT say it works and then call the 98% it didn't work for outliers.
That is exactly what Pitchford is doing here. He is outright dismissing negative criticism as "sadists" and pretending that the games are good and it's our fault if we're not satisfied. Newsflash: If that were the case, these games would have similar averages on Metacritic to other games. Trolls (and sadists, apparently) tend to spread their venom pretty evenly; if one company's games in particular seem to have worse reputations and worse average reviews than everyone else, that's not random hate. That's bad games.
P.S. Thanks
P.P.S. I think this quote about sums up what I think of Randy Pitchford:
"There's a lot of online bullies and haters and bloggers. We stand up to them, and I think we're the only ones that ever have as restaurant owners. And they come and they try to attack us and they say horrible things that are not true."
-Amy Bouzaglo, Amy's Baking Company
