Blizzard - specifically, the WoW team, is one of the biggest offenders here, but it’s far from the only one. For the last decade or so, it really seems like many poor game designers have a big, undeserved ego along with a massive anti-player bias.
Even great studios like Insomniac have people like this pop up on occasion. It’s puzzling to me why you would pursue this career while having such a lack of passion in what you do, and such a weird hatred for your customers. If you hate people, just be a lawyer or pursue a business career.
I think the last line in your post hits the nail squarely on the head.
A thing that starts out as a labor of love and hope, if sucessful inevitably devolves into just another profit driven global corporation and the MBAs and lawyers who take control see their customers at best to be cash cows and at worst infernal whining hated nuisances.
Where to begin with this one? First of all, most of the developers back two decades ago were passionate gamers that made games they wanted to play and thought people would enjoy. If they fell flat they generally could sympathize with upset players and work around them to try and make them feel welcome instead of wholly alienated unless what they wanted was completely antithetical for the core design of the game. Like it or not, to my mind as far as the prominent games go, there’s ONE person who is a lead developer that is a hardcore gamer at heart and has been such a frustrated player by companies in the past that he knows how valuable it is to show your players they are heard and appreciated. That guy is currently leading FFXIV’s team to constant highs.
Now games are developed by a generation who was raised on being sheltered away from criticism and raised to believe their opinions were always right. To add insult to injury, most game studios have been horribly corporatized. The additional capital definitely helped but the second Candy Crush happened and investors saw the ridiculous amount of profit that existed within gaming, they began to invest and started demanding games be focused around protecting their investment. This meant pumping as little resources as possible for the most return due to our legal system being so horribly screwed up it actually protects investors to such a wide reaching degree that if investors are made aware of you not abusing every possible shortcut or tax loophole they can actually take you to court over it.
As well as the fact a lot of developers have become politically minded, which isn’t inherently an issue as everyone has their politics and some care more about their views than others. The issue is they care more about their views than the customers so they have no issue turning games into their political soapboxes, and throwing player satisfaction under the bus. Remember, these are people that care more about how other people perceive them than their actual merits. Making a solid game and getting praise for that means less to them than a journalist praising their game not for the game’s merits, but for having the right opinions on topics and if you want any idea of how powerful this was. There was a meme the last couple years with Blizzard whenever they got into hot water they made a character in one of their games gay out of nowhere. That’s why when the lawsuit dropped people were like “Wonder which Overwatch character is being made gay this time.” Except that no longer has the punch, people have caught on and realized it. Now they’re instead doing a bunch of wokeism by removing vaguely offensive tidbits of dialogue because they’re more concerned with appearing to care about LGBT individuals views of them for their politics rather than their players viewing them negatively for allowing the game to burn to the ground.
Yeah, but that’s on the executive/corporate side of things. I don’t understand how the development team itself has these types of just, extremely negative political slacktivists in their ranks.
It’s like those people that were hating on rock and metal back in the day trying to start a metal band, like, what are you doing?
I’d say it’s not even an issue from “the last decade or so,” it’s just much more visible now, in an age where nearly everybody has a camera and microphone on their person at all times.
Oh, they didn’t start out that way, they had a lot of passion and drive.
But then they interacted with the community, and the community squashed any passion, hopes and dreams they had.
I mean, when you realize no matter how hard you work, no matter how hard you try, no matter what you produce, you get pilloried and dragged on social media as being incompetent and lazy, well, you start phoning it in.
