The journalists I’m seeing are just saying “it’s fine if you don’t like it, but it’s embarrassing how some people are displaying their dislike”
Like the guy who asked the “is this a prank” question at the panel? Don’t be that guy.
Here’s a collection someone made of (granted highly selected) terrible takes from journalists,
Unlike many of these journalists, “is this a prank” guy didn’t insult anyone, and he didn’t use profanity. In fact, I don’t think the manner in which he framed his disappointment was inappropriate at all.
Seriously. A company announces a product that you aren’t interested in buying.
So what?
Don’t buy it, go about your day.
Problem solved.
There are a number of reasons to be glad I left the electronic games industry a decade and half ago, but I swear, not having to deal with ridiculously over-entitled fans is right up there with not dealing with game industry hours, and well ahead of game industry pay scales.
Now imagine you paid hundred bucks for a blizzcon ticket, traveled across the country because you are excited about next full entry in Diablo series, and get served mobile cashgrab reskin as The grand reveal at the end of the keynote. And after expressing your displeasure, you get labeled as TOXIC MASCULINIED GOOBERGRABER by not at all corporate shilling nonjournalists.
First, Blizzard warned that you weren’t going to be getting a Diablo 4 Announcement (https://us.diablo3.com/en/blog/22549433/) at BlizzCon.
Second, I can’t think of another way to say this, if you spent hundreds of dollars to be able to say that you were told a release date with your own ears in person, rather than hearing about it 10 seconds later online, well, you have bigger issues than the press being mean to you.
They don’t get it. The community is never wrong. By definition. They’re the customers, if you aren’t serving them, making them happy, you are the one making a mistake.
That doesn’t mean the “is this an april fool’s joke” guy wasn’t a dick. Of course he was. But Blizzard really didn’t handle this properly.
Like I said earlier, Bethesda anticipated a similar reaction when they released the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser. That short-circuited a lot of the criticism they would have received from farming out F:76, by telling their community that yes, of course, they were still working on games their core community wanted to play, and farming out a side game or two doesn’t change that one bit.
Nonsense.
Blizzard will make what it chooses to make. If they choose incorrectly, then they won’t get sales as large. If they choose correctly, they will get larger sales. Blizzard, however, are the ones taking all the risk, and they are the ones making the decision.
Conflating a vocal group with “the community” is a fundamental mistake. Either the vocal folks are right, in which case Blizzard will deal with the impact either way, and shouting and stamping your feet is irrelevant, or Blizzard is right, and the agitated people are irrelevant to that outcome.
Blizzard’s customer base is far larger than the people currently shouting, and we have no mapping between the two groups.
After all, the “Fallout Community” was even more vehemently inflamed against Bethesda’s plans for Fallout, and well, they were clearly and demonstrably wrong.
Ouch, some of those journalist’s reactions make them look way crazier than the fans.
Blizzcon attendees are the hardest of hardcore fans. Piss them off at your peril.
This all could have been avoided with an ES6-style teaser. Just poor PR.
“No Mutants Allowed members are the hardest of hardcore fans. Piss them off at your peril.”
The analogy does not fit. One was a couple hundred people at an obscure website.
Obviously you’re always going to piss someone off, no matter what you do. But getting booed at your own convention es no bueno. I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Game developers should make the games they plan to make, and people will either buy them or not. That is the relationship.
Personally, I think things like BlizzCon are a mistake because they give the player base the impression that they are more influential and important than they actually are – Blizzard could lose the 27k so attendees from their player base and no one would actually notice.
Of course, fans are not entitled to anything. As you say, firms have every right to choose the products they wish to bring to market.
But, by parallel reasoning, customers have every right to voice criticism.
If you don’t want to listen to people expressing such criticism, so what?
Don’t listen to them, go about your day.
Problem solved.
And people have the right to call them overly entitled whiners, and well, here we are.
You’re saying that communities don’t translate into revenue? I don’t know that I’ve seen any hard data on it, but that does not seem likely to be true.
Or did you mean that devs shouldn’t interact with the communities that spring up around their games? That’s certainly one view of the matter, but that’s poisonous in a gaming as a service model like a MMO. We know this because every MMO studio tries it at their zenith, then rapidly retreats into engaging with the community when they start to founder.
There’s a difference between voicing criticism and becoming a toxic fan. If you would rather a product die, or the company die, because it’s not exactly what you specifically want, you are a toxic fan. If you then make it your mission to make sure everyone in the world agrees with you, you’re a toxic fan.
You mean the guy who paid at least $200 for a ticket and traveled to Anaheim to see what Blizzard was going to announce? I might have felt I was being punked, too.
And it was pretty damn funny.
It depends on the community. One of the lessons learned in the MMO space was that the people most vocal in a community are not necessarily representative of the community, and in fact, it is possible for vocal community members to be a net loss if they drive away more players than they represent.
Certainly, the Fallout community pre-Fallout 3 was adamantly opposed to Bethesda’s vision for the game. Bethesda ignored them, they screamed and ranted and railed, and now they are a negligible fraction of the Fallout community.
Another thing learned in the MMO space is that what players say and what they do are often entirely different. Designing your games by using the vocal members of the fanbase as a design committee is almost inevitably a mistake. Paying attention to what players actually do in a game is almost never a mistake.
BTW, I guess the GamerGate crowd has heard their call to arms and now this whole thing is going to become a totally different thing. Lots of brigading against Blizzard incoming.
What can they do, just say “this sucks and I’m done with Blizzard forever?” OK, fine. That’s their choice.
Or by referencing GG did you mean they’re threatening to rape individual developers to death?