They're saying the fireworks don't start until Dave unloads that long rant on Paul, which is crap. I would be utterly offended if any PR person told me to "put on your big boy hat" or suggested that he would take the items I had ordered and sell them on eBay. Or, even threaten to cancel my order altogether if I tried to cancel it and reorder to take advantage of a new discount being offered. I think Dave was completely justified in just finally losing his crap on this utterly unhelpful, insulting douchebag.

Gabe isn't the first person to take their exchange with Paul public. He just happens to be the most famous.

Greg, I wish to respectfully dissent.

On a few things you said...

Greg the White wrote:

he has a million teenagers who he could rile up for the smallest reasons

These controllers are $49.99 each. Our man Dave bought two. Tack on shipping and taxes and he spent well over $100, that he was already billed for (against policy), when the items he had ordered had not even shipped yet. I'm not sure what your situation is but $100 is a lot of money for me, and to have to taken from you without any idea when you were going to receive the items you were paying for, and having it reach two months past the time you were charged without any sign of what you paid for? That's not really the smallest thing in the world. For me, that'd be pretty big.

Greg the White wrote:

Dave could have stopped corresponding with Paul

Could he? Paul was the one to reply to his inquiries as to where his controller or money was. At this point he was essentially out over $100 with nothing to show for it. I think instead of arguing with Paul, he could have asked for contact information to someone else he could talk to about his order, but honestly I doubt Paul would have directed him to anyone else.

Could this have been handled better? Absolutely. But when frustrated, people tend to go with their gut and not necessarily make the most rational moves. Dave was pissed at the subpar, horrendous treatment he was getting, and he lashed out at Paul while passing the correspondance on to several media outlets/gaming sites in hopes of getting attention. After all, when companies get heavy bad press, they tend to bend to the customer instead of sticking to being dicks (Bank of America, Verizon, etc). Gabe saw this total blowhard bragging about being in the pockets of virtually everyone and their mother. He saw this man bragging about being at PAX, which was Gabe's own baby, and he took the opportunity to make an impact the only way he could: he told the blowhard he wouldn't be allowed at PAX, and he helped the story get more exposure.

What's happened to Paul as a result sucks. It really does. His family got threatened, which is really fucked up. His name is everywhere. His PR company got a ton of very very negative exposure. And yes, the company making the controllers got fucked over in a huge way. But don't forget the core cause of all of this. It wasn't Gabe making it public. It was Paul himself. If he had done his job professionally, reasonably, and correctly by answering the questions Dave was asking with information that was actually helpful or even coherent, literally none of this would have happened.

Jack Slater wrote:

Bullshit. The core cause of the mass psychosis was the Penny Arcade guy, you're just deluding yourself to think otherwise. Had he not rallied his nerd horde, it would have been just another consumer complaint.

Sorry, I respectfully disagree.

If you're masturbating with a conveyor belt and it rips your testicle out and you end up in the hospital with doctors laughing at you and your face all over the news because that shit was just too rich to keep to themselves, don't blame the conveyor belt. The fault lies with you using it to wank with in the first place.

The fact remains that if Paul hadn't been a douche then there would have been nothing to report. No shitty PR. No bad customer service. No drama. Just some mild annoyance over China being slow and customs holding the controllers up.

Also, just an FYI sort of update: Once the other company was brought in to take Paul's place, he tried to extort them for money by refusing to hand over email and twitter accounts that belonged to Avenger unless they gave him a share of the profits from here on. As soon as the new PR company made what Paul was trying to do public, Paul backed down and agreed to start handing the accounts over.