Anti-Rant: The Seething

There was an interesting little piece on Medium from Morgan Jaffit, the guy behind Hand of Fate (a criminally under-rated game in my opinion).  In it, he opines on the rather vitriolic nature of some fans in their "communications" with developers.  Which is to say, he makes it clear he doesn't like it when people flame his game, or anybody else's game for that matter.  Moreover, he questions the long term viability of indie development if indie developers find themselves so besieged that they decide to pack in because of all the hate.  I figured I'd put my own two cents in, and not have it come out like I want to skin developers alive and use their skulls for a hood ornament.

I can only speak for myself when I try to parse out Jaffit's article.  As somebody who's reviewed games and been the person who's had to deal with the PR reps directly at press events and shows like E3, I've certainly tried to keep the tone as professional as possible in my personal interactions, even as I've excoriated developers and publishers in my reviews and op-eds when they've screwed up in egregious fashions.  While I've been a little rough with mid-tier and "budget" developers who've turned out bad games, I've also been fairly understanding when it comes to indies.  Part of it is an understanding of the logistics involved.  Some of these guys are working on shoestring budgets, with whatever assets and tech they can get away with using that won't cost them their first born children or a couple of kidneys, and some of those guys turn out incredible work.  Others, not so much.  I try to recognize when somebody's making an effort and coming up short, but sometimes, you simply can't avoid calling out a bad game.

Yet Jaffit's piece seemed quote a lot more "mean Tweets" aimed at large developers and publishers rather than the indie crowd.  And while I'm not automatically going to accuse the guys at the big name studios and publishers of being any less dedicated to their craft than a group of guys in the team lead's garage, there are differences of scale which in turn create differences in kind.  It's not quite comparing apples to oranges.  More like comparing oranges to grapefruits.  Both citrus, but each with distinct differences.  Let's take a look at three major players who've recently had their player bases sharpening their pitchforks and stocking up on torches.

Bungie

Of late, gamers have had a love-hate relationship with Bungie.  Destiny 2 has been shedding players like a sheepdog in summer among a rising chorus of complaints about the lack of content and the excessive grind.  The Curse of Osiris expansion proved to be less entertaining than players had hoped.  The Faction Rallies and Iron Banner events have fallen flat.  Even special events like Crimson Days and The Dawning which were big draws in the original game haven't been able to reverse the fortunes of the sequel's death by a thousand cuts.  What has spawned such malaise among the player base?

A good portion of the discontent can quite honestly be placed at the feet of the developers for committing one of the cardinal sins of gaming, one that applies to devs and players alike: Don't repeat your mistakes.  The parallels between Year 1 for the first and second games are almost too pointed.  Some have even argued that Destiny 2's first year has somehow managed to be worse.  Speaking for myself, I've barely logged in over the last couple months.  I have a very small clan, and all of them are playing something else.  But comparing notes, it's eerily similar to that first year of Destiny: the content ran out, the grind is oppressive almost to the point of intolerable, and the storage solutions are grossly inadequate.  Even the first expansion somehow mirrored The Dark Below, giving players a short campaign, a mysterious new character, and a vendor with a blindfold over their eyes.  The only difference is that Eris Morn was at least morbidly entertaining when you turned stuff in to her.

So far, Bungie's response has been to promise things will be faster and give people a bunch of new emblems, as well as specific loot from the Nightfall strikes.  This is not what the players are asking for.  They don't want more steak sauce, they want more steak.

EA

The controversy over Star Wars Battlefront II has been like nothing seen since the heyday of Jack Thompson and Leland Yee.  When the U.S. Congress takes note and rumbles about legislation, it's significant.  When state legislatures outside of California and New York start rumbling about legislation, it's beyond significant, bordering on ominous for those who've attracted their gaze.  Up until Battlefront II, loot boxes were a growing presence and a growing annoyance, but they were still only at the level of irritant.  And then EA did what EA normally does.  They made a decision purely on the potential to make money without even stopping to consider if anybody might object to it.  One has to wonder if some of those suits believed nobody had a right to object to it, because it was done to make money, and who objects to that?

But people did object.  Loudly.  Vehemently.  The blowback from this one decision probably will put EA back in the running for "Worst Company in America" this year.  And it will be richly deserved.  More importantly, it has created a situation which will undoubtedly haunt big name game developers and publishers for years to come.  From now until the end of human civilization, they will have to tread carefully, trying to avoid the possible conflation of their business with casinos.  EA did something far worse than just screw their players.  They managed to screw the entire industry.

Ubisoft

If there is a better example of a company eventually doing the right thing, possibly for the wrong reasons, that stands out more strongly than Ubisoft, I have yet to find it.  Their near-fanatical devotion to the concept of "games as a service" is almost insufferable.  Purportedly, they're making money on the idea, but the breakdown of when that money is actually coming in seems to be something of a mystery.  It might be they're making enough money off "whales" to cover costs after the initial release, people with more money than sense subsidizing the rest of the player base.  Yet look how Ubisoft releases games and you see a dangerous combination of both Bungie and EA in their actions.  Consider The Division, a cover shooter which came out in 2016.  It took them well over a year before the game was considered "fun" by the player base, which dwindled down radically after initial release owing to lack of end-game content and serious issues with play balance in the PvP-focused "Dark Zone" area.  Even now, while there are several quality-of-life improvements, a lot of the "fun" content is still locked behind the walls of the add-ons, a mistake Bungie made in Destiny and Destiny 2.

Then there's Rainbow Six: Siege, a co-op multiplayer game which has taken to packaging new content into "seasons" which are almost as expensive as the base game was to purchase originally.  In some respects, it's a nickel-and-dime approach which calls to mind EA's actions with games like Dead Space 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic.  In other respects, it's an original breed of insanity which seems to punish long time players by effectively requiring them to buy the game all over again.  And still Ubisoft claims that they're making money off the deal.

I've always been struck by a line from the movie Chasing Amy: "Can I explain the audience principle to you?  If you insult and accost them, then we have no audience!"  For the longest time, it seems as though a lot of game developers and publishers have forgotten "the audience principle," and then they wonder why the audience suddenly got so hostile to them.  Perhaps if they'd kept the idea that they don't want to insult and accost their audience from the beginning, they might not have to deal with the current state of discontent.