There's two sides to this, as people have been saying. On one hand, Orth was a fucking idiot. I'd even say losing his job was justified. Not so much that he deserved to lose it, but Microsoft was justified in firing him. They had to for the sake of the Xbox brand. He could have avoided it by being smarter about what he said. There's having an opinion, and then there's tactlessly insulting people for having a different opinion and bringing your company tons of bad PR. As much as I hated his opinion, it wasn't his opinion, but how he handled things that makes me think he earned his firing.
On the other side of things, the Internet does have a problem. I'm personally one to often ironically say "the internet is serious business!" in situations where people take it too seriously, and indeed, people do often make a big deal out of things when they shouldn't (someone on the internet that I'll never meet said something I disagree with! I must show them the error of their ways! We're all guilty of that sometimes), but on the other hand, there are plenty of times where the internet DOES go too far. What Orth did was stupid and people were completely justified to be angry at him. However, when you're angry at someone, you don't have to go as far as some did. I'm not saying you have to act all prim and proper and say "good sir, I respectfully disagree, I think an always online system would be detrimental to the industry." I think it's perfectly fine to vent your anger by tweeting back "Fuck you, you pretentious asshole! No one gives a shit about your opinion, you need to give your customers what they fucking want!" You know, if that's your opinion, so be it, and sometimes when you're pissed a little more extreme language is called for. The internet isn't really a professional setting most of the time so who cares. However, chasing him off of social media and out of town with barbaric death threats and wishes of terminal illness on his family is unacceptably uncivil. Asking him to filter it out isn't entirely fair, because he would have had to filter out literally everything with how mad he made people, and their persistence in harassing him was enough that his real life fear was justified, I think.
That said, there were better people to send this message than him. There are people who get horribly harassed by internet mobs that didn't actively provoke the mobs with inflammatory statement after inflammatory statement. While I recognize that the problem is real, and that the internet mob is a real, dangerous phenomenon, it's hard for me to feel empathy for him, it's just too ironic that HE of all people is coming out to say this. That said, if his game somehow incorporates themes of internet toxicity in, I'd be curious as to how he executes that. It could be really interesting.
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