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)
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.