By all accounts, The Last of Us Part 2 is a smashing success: The survival horror game has a 94 on review score-collating site Metacritic and has already sold millions of copies.

except for the fact that merely discussing the game has become, within large swaths of the video game community, toxic.

It’s still visible on social media, where top replies to nearly anything from Naughty Dog will include responses like “The game is straight garbage.” It seems unlikely that these opinions are coming from people who have actually played the game, given that it’s impossible to explain how The Last of Us Part 2 could have racked up hundreds of negative user reviews on Metacritic immediately after launch.

As Kotaku reported, Naughty Dog at one point showed a fake scene during a trailer to make people believe that a character would be more present in the game than they actually were.

On June 12, Vice published its review of The Last of Us Part 2, in which critic Rob Zacny said that while the game had “memorable moments” that made for great “spectacle,” he was less taken with the story and characters.

Rather than seeing such reportage as a part of the job — it’s news when one of the biggest games of the year has a huge leak months before release — news writers were positioned as betrayers who weren’t on the “side” of developers.

Now that the game is actually out, that tension between the people involved with the game and members of the press has only become more noticeable.

Schreier had already clarified that although The Last of Us Part 2 had been the game that inspired his tweet, his central message wasn’t specific or limited to Naughty Dog’s game.

Schreier’s offhand critique spoke to some dark truths about the general state of the video game industry.

He was referring to the push to make bigger video games as a means of justifying the $60 cost, and how that pads game length.

Worse, that endless content push can also lead to crunch and burnout from the people who have to fill these worlds with endless things to do — including game developers at Naughty Dog, according to Schreier’s own reporting.

It’s made talking about the game exhausting.

On the other hand, we’ve got the people who actually made the game putting their figurative fists up.

It’s not enough that the game is selling well, and that most reviews are positive; you can’t fall out of line with that general consensus, even as a joke, without having to worry about whether or not a publisher will be looking over your shoulder, or if hundreds of fans will blow up your social media