I don't see what's wrong with that. The idea he is trying to get across is that death threats are not appropriate, but the CEO Sean Murray is indeed a lier and betrayed a large audience who believed in him and gave him a huge sum of pre-orders. Unhappiness is to be expected from a company who's CEO is a pathological lier.
Watch his interviews - he talks about it being an MMO style game in some of them, where you can meet your friends and explore side by side. Literally claims the game is multiplayer and it is labeled as co-op before launch. Players buy the game and realize there is literally no co-op whatsoever on launch day.
Sean Murray was involved in the engineering efforts, and knew he was outright lying to the media. It wasn't like he was a detached CEO of a large company not engaged in engineering so he didn't really know what was going on. No, he knew all the features he claimed where not real. He flat out took advantage of all of his customers.
GP's word was "unacceptable", not "not appropriate", but I think yours is probably the better position for such a vaguely defined term as "death threat".
On the more meta level as one commenter points out how sometimes "death threats" can be used as a DDOS attack on a person, they can also sometimes be used to get undeserved sympathies. Making up alleged offenses is not new and many people seem to just take this guy (who we know is a liar) at his word that these vague terrible things happened that he doesn't want to go into more details about. (I should clarify that I don't really doubt that he received hate mail and possibly other communications that could be classified "death threat" by some people, this being the internet, and the people involved being gamers. But hate mail is merely inappropriate, generally speaking; it's rude. A specific piece of hate mail could be unacceptable, it depends.)
"Death threat" is a specific term; it has a legal definition in most states. There are no appropriate or acceptable death threats. It doesn't matter if you think they're not consequential; they had the desired effect on the person receiving the threat.
This whole argument is strongly reminiscent of attempts to discredit female game developers who were being harassed during GamerGate.
You're absolutely right! The structure exhibits significant opportunity for improvement. Here, let me propose an alternative structure that avoids the issue you so rightly and correctly highlight:
> Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences.
Again, you're completely right. There should under no circumstances ever be any caveats in any way, shape, form, or manner that could be even remotely read to justify such horrific behavior.
It is also faintly possible that there might be other aspects of these events that may merit genuine discussion. Some people might go so far as to say that such aspects should be up for discussion independently of any horrific behavior that may have taken place.
Expressing this nuance does take some modicum of rhetorical skill, which not everyone has had the experience to properly acquire. With this in mind, it might be wise to consider if comments can be read charitably.
I can see how some might misinterpret that statement to mean that I am suggesting that the death threats were justified. I am not, and that is why I was explicit with my language explaining that it is an unacceptable crime that deserves severe legal consequences. The sentences that follow the "but" do not contradict my condemnation of anonymous death threats. Hopefully that makes things clear.
Watch his interviews - he talks about it being an MMO style game in some of them, where you can meet your friends and explore side by side. Literally claims the game is multiplayer and it is labeled as co-op before launch. Players buy the game and realize there is literally no co-op whatsoever on launch day.
Sean Murray was involved in the engineering efforts, and knew he was outright lying to the media. It wasn't like he was a detached CEO of a large company not engaged in engineering so he didn't really know what was going on. No, he knew all the features he claimed where not real. He flat out took advantage of all of his customers.