Biggest Headache For Game Developers: Abusive Fans 381
chicksdaddy writes "Haters keep buyin' — that appears to be the dynamic playing out in the ever-hot video game industry, where game developers say harassment and trolling from their rabid fans is turning them off of development completely, according to a report over at Polygon.com. 'Fans are invested in the stories and worlds that developers create, and certain design decisions can be seen by fans to threaten those stories and worlds,' said Nathan Fisk, lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the book Bullying in the Age of Social Media. 'Harassment silences and repositions content creators in ways that protect the interests of certain fan groups, which again is no justification for the kinds of abusive behavior and language seen online today.' The problem is widespread enough that it may even pose a threat to the future of the industry. Developers, both named and those who wish to remain anonymous, tell Polygon that harassment by gamers is becoming an alarmingly regular expected element of game development. Some developers say the problem was among the reasons they left the industry, others tell Polygon that the problem is so ubiquitous that it distracts them from making games or that they're considering leaving the industry."
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that's exactly what the article is about and not stuff like:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=call+of+duty+death+threats
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bioware+death+threats
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes - self-censorship. The internal voice that says, or should say, "This is something that should not be said to another person, since I (ideally) don't want to be a jack ass".
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Informative)
Death threats are not criticism.
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:2, Informative)
Really? You're going to go down the "blame the victim" path here? It's the developer's fault that some people in his audience are childish tools?
That's fucking ludicrous
Re:Two simple suggestions (Score:2, Informative)
You cannot possibly give "The fans" what they want, because you have lots of fans, which often want very contradictory things.
I have worked in the MMO industry, and every time we'd do an update, you'd hear the hard-core people screaming in the forums that we should only do high-end raid dungeons, because Real Players all had max level characters, and so there was no point in catering to clueless noobs who didn't know how to play the game. And at the same time, user surveys and in-game data revealed that we had a large userbase of people with lots of mid-level characters, many of whom had no max level characters at all, whose biggest desire was more mid-level and low level content that could be played solo or with small groups; these people would get sad whenever we'd release a new top-tier raid dungeon, because that was content that they'd likely never be able to see. Most of these people didn't post a lot on the forums, so if you just went by volume of forum commentary, they'd be drowned out.
It just isn't _possible_ to build one piece of content that satisfies both of those customers, they fundamentally want different things -- one of them wants a lot of approachable content that they can get to and play relatively easily as they explore the world, the other wants Extreme Elite Content that only the best of the best can handle, and will find their experience cheapened if the dungeon has an "easy mode" that allows more people to see it.
So, we basically alternated releases -- if this month's release had big raid stuff, then next time we released content, it would be a new low or mid level region (or during times when we had more staff, we'd occasionally do a release which did some of both). It never made any of the fans Really Happy, because all of them thought we were wasting half of our time.
But you know what? Sometimes "some designer somewhere" _does_ know better, because that designer is capable of seeing the fanbase as a whole, rather than just one fan, or just the slice of fans that post on one forum.