Phil Fish, the controversial Montreal-based developer behind the critically acclaimed Fez, announced that he is cancelling Fez 2 and is planning to get out of the games industry.

This news follows a rather public, rather vulgar Twitter spat with games media personality Marcus Beer, also known as GameTrailers’ Annoyed Gamer, over Phil’s refusal to comment to the gaming media about Microsoft’s about-face on its indie self-publishing policy.

On Friday’s episode of Invisible Walls on GT, Beer took issue with Fish and fellow indie dev Jonathan Blow’s refusal to comment on the latest Xbox One-80 by referring to the men as “tosspots,” “wankers,” “arseholes” and “f***ing hipsters.”

Things escalated quite quickly on Twitter with Fish angry tweeting at Beer before adding, “Compare your life to mine and then kill yourself.” Beer didn’t back down from his remarks and it just degenerated into a Twitter shouting match.

It ended with Fish tweeting, “I’m done. Fez II is cancelled. Goodbye.” The Polytron Twitter account posted a similar message indicating the cancellation of Fez II.

Later on in the evening on Polytron’s website, Fish posted:

FEZ II is cancelled.
i am done.
i take the money and i run.
this is as much as i can stomach.
this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign.

you win.

According to GameTrailers, Fish later tweeted, “I’m getting out of games because I choose not to put up with this abuse anymore.”

Clearly, the day’s events weren’t the cause of the end of Fez II and Fish’s career in gaming. Anyone who has followed the man knows that he is a magnet for hatred from the internet, be it in the comment sections of blogs, on social media and even from members of the gaming media. As Fish wrote, this was something that has been happening over a long stretch of time. Yesterday’s events just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’m not going to blame Marcus Beer for this. No one person should shoulder the blame for all the crap Phil Fish gets. Nor will I blame Fish. Whether you have a thin skin or not doesn’t mean that you can necessarily handle continuous abuse without breaking. Frankly, nobody should have to put up with constant abuse because he should have a “thick skin.”

I quite enjoyed my time with Fez. Whether you like Phil Fish or not, I think he makes a pretty good video game. It’s a shame to see him go out like this but hopefully his future endeavours are less stressful and more rewarding.

I’ll have more about some of the other things Marcus Beer said in his rant in a column this week.

Note: Tweets and quotations have been edited for grammar.