Answering GDC’s 2023 survey, 78% of respondents said they considered the harassment and toxicity developers receive from the public to be a serious issue. A simple sentiment is often the most effective, and the title of Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah’s latest video cuts right to the heart of it: “Your $70 doesn’t buy you cruelty.”
You don’t have to like a game, and you don’t have stay quiet if you have complaints, says Darrah. You’re entitled to be angry, and you’re entitled to express that anger. “If you are mad at that Ubisoft game, be mad at Ubisoft,” he says. “Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it.” (Thanks, PC Gamer and GamesRadar)
Remember when everyone was a “racist, sexist, bigot, fascist, incel, chud” and the game wasn’t made for you?
If this is how the Devs spoke before their game was even out yet, then yes, being gleeful about it failing to sell is understandable. It may be cruel, but there are no innocent people in this.
They know who they work for and who is speaking for them.
Of course there are innocent people, what the fuck.
Be gleeful about it failing to sell, yes. But don’t be cruel. Don’t be glad that people who did their jobs have lost their jobs because a CEO wants to preserve investors’ profits. All the bad decisions that made the game what it was, in a huge company like EA or Ubisoft, were probably because of upper management and not because the people who lose their jobs did their jobs poorly.
Dunk the game on reviews, tell your friends it sucks, hell even laugh at the grumbling of the pre-orderers or the captive audience of fans who will die on the hill. But don’t be cruel.
Be(e) kind.
I have no personal vendetta against any of these individual Devs.
My stake in this is slightly different. Like, when I heard about how Blizzard treated it’s own staff and then the whole sexual harassment thing popped up, I was done with them. From that point on, that company doesn’t deserve to exist and I blacklisted them. So i try to keep up with gaming related news.
More studios have joined that list since, for various reasons, and I find myself mostly playing indie titles from small upcoming developers now. I feel better about that.
I do believe we should be(e) kind. But I also believe kindness is a two way street.
Wait… when was this? Who did this?
I know of some specific instances of like community managers or a single employee clapping back. Apparently they speak for every employee and the entire studio? Is that how this works?
It’s more of a summery of all the things gamers have been called over the last few years.
It pretty much started with Anita Sarkeesian and although she herself isn’t in the gaming industry a bunch of people that are in it, seem to have taken to her words to heart and continued spitting on their own customers. So this has been going on for a while.
And yes, Community Managers do speak for the Developers, that is literally their job. Individual Developers also speak for them all when there’s no consequences internally or even a lame standardized statement being put out by the studio they work for, denouncing or dissociating neither with their statement or the individual.
Crudely but, this is where we are now. People are fed up and everyone is lashing out.
Personally, I don’t have a beef with any individual Devs, that I can think of. But I have indeed been so disillusioned by the AAA industry over the years, that seeing some of these studios fail almost feels like a schoolyard bully getting his comeuppance. But that’s for other reasons, mostly.
This just reminding that Postal is the cause of all the violence because we played games on certain hardware. I’m pretty sure at the time if they had ISIS terrorist attacks they would blamed Postal as the cause.