Image from Aeropause.

Destiny's Child creator (a forthcoming WiiWare title as well as being available now on Steam for PC gamers) Luc Bernard has called it quits. Citing the firestorm of bad press following Destructoid.com's 1/10 review, he has decided to work on graphic novels.

The clear moral of this story is he who lives by boasting shall die by boasting. Luc masterfully played the internet like a fiddle, generating large amounts of hype for a small, downloadable indie platformer. His salvos against the industry, while tiresome, proved effective in garnering support from the same sort of people who rip Wii Music all day long.

Yet the problem with this sort of manipulation is that your product had better be good- real good. And it is clear that Destiny's Child had its problems. 1/10 problems? I don't know about that. But the gameplay videos, as chronicled here and elsewhere, looked suspect anyway.

Indie game developers always seem so out of balance. Either they are too timid, to the point of either never finishing anything or hiding under a rock when they do, or they go on and on about how amazing their game is, and then fail to even get past the pitch document stage.

Obviously Luc Bernard doesn't neatly fit into those categories: Eternity's Child is a finished game, and anyone who can finish is a winner in my book. But the problem is his attitude. In insulting the entire industry, and gamers themselves, he created a condition in which anything but the most revolutionary small platforming title ever would have resulted in at least some backlash.

Had he simply been proud of his product in a reasonable manner, people would look at him not as a failure, but as a very talented artist who needed a little help with gameplay. He wouldn't have had to quit anything.

Read.