- Developers of Cities: Skylines 2 have noticed a growing toxicity in their community, which is affecting engagement and creativity.
- The CEO of Colossal Order expressed concern about the negative impact of toxicity on the team and the community.
- The developers still encourage helpful criticism from the community but ask for it to be constructive and kind.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/mVaIY
This is happening everywhere in gaming, people could be critical without being complete assholes, it’s getting out of hand.
On one hand people can be jerks, on the other hand there definetaly is a trend of releasing broken games with a ‘patch it later’ mentality.
Its kind of hard to take a side because people being assholes isn’t the solution but remaining civil is just going to encourage the behaviour and we’ll get even more broken releases.
That’s true but, at the end of the day, it’s developers who have no control over how a game is released getting shat on and harrassed instead of the publishers actually responsible for it.
Then don’t buy games on release. There’s no rush. I’ve been pretty satisfied just buying games I want on sale and have still built up quite the backlog mainly getting titles at 75%+ off. No Man’s sky and subnautica were both just awesome games for me because the period where they were unfinished and disappointing was long past by the time I tried them.
And in my experience, toxicity doesn’t really encourage improving something so much as it encourages stopping to care how the toxic person feels about anything at all. Sometimes that caring even goes negative and the target of the toxicity can take pleasure in how much grief they’ve caused the person spewing out the vitriol.
Toxicity is for burning bridges, not encouraging better behaviour.
People who have studied game theory will know that a corporation’s bad behavior needs to be met with bad behavior, or they will simply keep taking advantage of consumers. Low level employees are innocent, but executives are willingly making bad decisions with the sole interest of lining their pockets.
Edit Lol I guess instead of learning basic game theory you can just downvote and continue your ignorance. Surely that won’t make the problem worse.
Public gaming is toxic by default. We’re not talking one person playing with their friend group, we’re talking gaming in the wild. Yeah, there’s gonna be exceptions, but the vast majority is mockery, lashing out, trolling, superiority and the like. I’ve disabled in game chats and voice for more than a decade because I’m sick of the BS.
So it’s not “happening” as a change, this is its normal state.
It does keep getting worse though, Starfield’s started a fire that keeps raging on 4 months later.
A game being called “literally unplayable” has been around since devs allowed early/beta access. Starfield is just the latest victim. No Man’s Sky is easily one of the worst, but they over-promised and far, far under-delivered.
Maybe if devs stopped talking their games up, making promises they don’t keep, showing gameplay that never makes it into the release version and then releasing buggy, broken junk they might stop receiving so much justifiable backlash.
I don’t assume making games is easy. However, devs constantly bowing to financial pressures in order to build hype, release unfinished games, and cut features is the real problem.
Developers don’t choose how their games are marketed, that’s also the publishers.
I use devs to generically describe the company that produces the game, markets it, and sells it. You are correct.
Ah, that’s fine then, I misunderstood.
Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech. Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.
What I don’t understand is the trolls who hate on stuff forever. Like cyberpunk 2077 for example still has haters who miss absolutely no occasion to shit on the game.
Upper management is always full of the slimiest people out there, I just don’t think that justifies the hate towards devs who just want to make a game and already have to put up with said upper management.
That’s basic relationship stuff : game studios broke player trust. It’s up to them to win it back.
Now different people react differently to the break of trust. Some do react poorly to it. But I won’t blame people, and I won’t sympathise with studios I don’t already trust.
Again, studios are just a bunch of people passionate to make cool games except for cases like The Day Before.
And sometimes they’re also assholes that disrespect players. Sometimes they’re too leniant and think a buggy mess is a game worth releasing. That’s disrespect. Being small is not an excuse to release an alpha version.
What you say actually mixes two quite distinct things, I feel:
I disagree with this, and quite harshly so. Independent of what companies do, and some of the releases very much fit the “not respecting” part, that’s not in any way, shape or form an excuse to be abuse to some poor support or outreach rep who has to read your shit. They’re just doing their job, they haven’t even gotten to the playing-a-video-game-in-my-leisure-time part of the day yet.
That is however quite true, and leads to an extreme echo chamber enforcing and reinforcing negative and abuse comments. It gets clicks, which is ad impressions, so it gets lifted to the top.
I’m not saying the behaviour of the game studios justify people hate. I’m saying it fuels it.
The relationship between a game company and a player base is not a equal one. And I’m not saying all game studios are responsible, but you only need enough of them to behave poorly for people to grow defiance for all of them.
And in this, it’s up to the developers to win back players trust, not to players to forgive game dev blindly.