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)
GAMERS ON THE WELL MANNERED PUPPY-GIRL ALPHA CHAD FEDERATED REDDIT ALTERNATIVE WHEN YOU BEG THEM NOT TO BE TOXIC TO THE DEVELOPER (THEY WILL DEFUSE THEIR SHITTINESS/THEY WILL NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY OR TAKE A TIRED DEVELOPER’S PLEAS GRACEFULLY)
GROW UP fuckers. The game sucks, I’ve played it. I’ve also been playing increasinly bad Dragon Age games long enough to know ITS EA, ITS ALWAYS BEEN EA. Everything they touch turns to shit. Veilguard was a live service team-based wave survival game like ME3 multiplayer until eight months before launch and you can reeeaaally tell.
I don’t give a fuck about blue haired devs, pronouns, none of that shit. If you do, grow up. Yes, Bioware is a skeleton crew with hack writers and a captain hired to go down with the ship and get the game out the door… BECAUSE OF EA.
ARE YOU JUST NOW PLAYING VIDEO GAMES FOR THE FIRST TIME? DID YOU NOT KNOW ABOUT THE PUBLISHERS IN GENERAL?
Gamergate’s still fucking going on. Bitching about Anita Sarkeesian in 2025 in response to a dev begging to stop being harassed, PATHETIC.
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Looking at some of the comments make be lost faith in humanity… Or maybe social media is just destined to be toxic
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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 didn’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.
But you see how this is different right? I boycott the vast majority of AAA publishers too, for the same reasons. That doesn’t mean I cheer when they do mass layoffs. It doesn’t sound like you do either.
I see how it’s different. And I’m not making excuses for anyone.
If anything, I’m saying I can understand where it’s coming from. But that doesn’t mean I’m onboard with it all.
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?
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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.
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If you can’t tell the difference between being upset that a game was made badly and being cruel to the developers, you may need to take a step back.
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NES games cost $60-$70 nearly 40 years ago. That would be like $150 if adjusted for inflation.
And if anything, the scale and cost of developing video games has skyrocketed since then…
Just something to consider…
The cost of developing games hasn’t skyrocketed. Developers have more means than ever. Many things that was handcrafted on crappy slow computers then are auto-generated in seconds now.
There’s no massive shipping costs or printing of physical mediums anymore. And no losses if the already printed cassettes or CD’s didn’t sell.
If a game costs hundreds of millions to develop, in this day and age, it’s by design and/or because of bloated companies.
Back when you also got a physical product with an instruction manual and possibly a poster or something else. Now we get a digital license that can be revoked and six months to a year of patching for it to be in a stable state. Yay!
Just something to consider…
And 40 years ago the federal minimum wage was $3.35, which adjusts to $9.89 today. Inflation for businesses isn’t an excuse when the inflation for consumers isn’t keeping up.
if we accept 70€ then they increase the price to 80€. when we accept that they increase it to 90€ and so on. Though i guess this becomes kind of moot point when high price on game has started to correlate with lower quality on every aspect except graphics.
I’ve purchased many games at $40 or less over the past year that have given me hundred of hours of joy and entertainment.
If I spend almost twice that price on a game, and it’s unfinished, buggy, and heavily monetized; you can bet your ass I’m going to be upset.
It’s not about the cost of development. It’s about quality of the experience. For indie devs, the game has to be good to do well. For a lot of AAA studios, the game is merely a product that only has to be as entertaining as it needs to be for them to make enough profit.
There’s a difference between being unhappy about a game and making your voice heard to the studio/publisher responsible, and singling out individuals who worked on the game to harass. This happens a lot with voice actors being targeted because people don’t like their performance, despite them just doing what the voice director told them to do.
There’s also a difference between saying “I don’t like ____” or “this game sucks” versus “I’m glad you got laid off, serves you right” or straight-up death threats. Just like the VAs, the development staff were working at the direction of the lead/director, who were possibly working at the direction of the publisher, so directing vitriol towards individuals is likely not productive, on top of being cruel. You are certainly allowed to make your opinion heard, but don’t be an asshole about it.
Yanno, that’s a fair line to have.
I think they make a valid point that there’s a difference between critique and criticism.
$70 is a lot to spend on a game for most people, so people want to feel they got their money’s worth, but you have to admit that the internet does have a bad habit of turning everything into hyperbole.
Still, a company with a multiple million dollar budget should be able to produce something truly amazing, especially when there’s indie devs and publishers that make truly memorable gems for what’s a comparatively shoestring budget.
If the big companies want to have more critiques and less criticism, perhaps they should start listening to players instead of producers.
People could avoid paying $70 for bad games by not preordering. Like seriously, it takes maybe two hours after release for the criticism to start pouring in.
With physical copies of games essentially being non-existent, there is absolutely no point in pre-ordering a game. Hold on to your money, and wait for reviews.
To be fair, the writing in this game is absolutely horrendous. Like “The Room” levels of bad.
It doesn’t matter how bad it was, it doesn’t justify or excuse the shithead behavior a lot of players are directing at individuals who worked on the game. As I stated in another comment, there’s a difference between saying “this game sucks” and personal attacks on individuals.
No. Not “fair”. You’re just justifying cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
A game doesnt have feelings, i can be cruel to it as much as i want. Being cruel to people is an issue tho i agree.
