The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

Playwrights hundreds of years ago didn't like people publicly disapproving their plays, or low ticket sales due to bad word-of-mouth. People have been conveying disapproving reviews for as long as people have been doing something which can be reviewed. That hasn't changed even though there are so many more things which can be reviewed now. There's nothing unique about this situation in the context of video games.

What's telling about this article is that the phrase "free speech" doesn't make an appearance or get any serious consideration. Free speech means people will say things you don't like, convey ideas you disagree with. A principled approach to free speech is not censorship -- "moderation" as the first screenshot complainer is said to have written ("If I quit gamedev, it wont be because of money, or lack of love for the craft, it will be because of the attitude of the vocal 0.1% of gamers who nobody will moderate."[sic] some uncredited person allegedly wrote). Calling a harangue "abuse" is an attempt at conflating something dismissably rare ("0.1%" we're told) and indistinguishable from free speech with actual abuse. We're also told that stalking a game programmer's family happens less frequently than someone's harangue. But virtually no exposition is wasted on something which could very well be genuinely abusive of someone else.

If the disapproving reviews come from such a small minority, they should be easy to ignore or skip past, and one should gain practice in using their advanced technical skill to make a computer not show them what they don't want to read. Also, readers can choose their reaction to seeing a screed; talking about them as abuse victims denies their agency. They don't have to choose to be an alleged victim (the "abused"), they can choose to conclude that someone who replies with "CUNT" repeatedly (as "SaintNick" replied to "ChineseRoom") is irrational and not to be taken seriously.

And please stop talking about "voting with your wallet", a phrase that can be justifiably be said to mean that one intends for wealthy people to deserve more "votes" than poorer people. It should be sufficient to explain that one could choose not to buy the next game that publisher releases, which is probably what one meant to say in the first place.

That said, I think there is also a lot of justified anger.

In a world that is increasingly terrible and hostile in a lot of ways it's really important to have a safe place, a place to unwind and settle down, place where people can tune in and drop out. Video games are really great for this purpose.

But a lot of devs don't seem to recognize that this is an important purpose of their product, either going low-brow capitalist (say, EA or Zynga or Bethesda) or high-brow artiste (Phil Fish, Jonathon Blow) and alienating their playerbase by breaking games in order to create higher profits, by patching games endlessly in the name of "gameplay" (Darkest Dungeon is a great example of this, ditto a lot of Blizzard's stuff), or by taking very public stands against various sacred cows of their customers--that is when they're not actively saying nasty things about their customers. As a gamer, why wouldn't you voice your displeasure at the people who are screwing up your ability to calm down and relax?

Similarly, even on the art angle, a lot of publishers and devs make compromises to push a message or sell a product. Like, can you imagine the backlash at a Holy Bible 3.0: HD Edition 2018, with DLC psalms? Game devs and publishers do this all the time. Imagine you heard they were making Rent 2.0, but everybody was straight and monogamous and only had the flu and were upper-middle class. Even if it was done well, even if it was a good story, it wouldn't be Rent. That's even assuming the change was done expertly--in video games it's usually a studio or a publisher chasing some market demographic or "industry trend" causing that violation of the IP and seldom is it even done well! So, if you're a gamer, why be nice to people that are willingly violating an IP that you love?

Further, on the PR front, gamers have gotten used to being fed thinly veiled bullshit as the industry has "matured". The same flaccid attempts to gloss over bugs or mistakes, the same lame attempts to use identity to sell a game, the same boring controversies and plant articles used to increase air time...it's insulting. So, why have empathy for (some random indie dev) when the industry as a whole is not behaving in good faith? Why not treat every dev communication as a weakly-spun PR gambit? Why show any charity at all?

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I agree that this is bad behavior, and I agree that drive-by virtual road rage accounts for a lot of it...but not all of it.

Many years ago, a small country where I live was dominated online by a single mentally ill person. In our country, those day the internet was new and quite slow. This person, originally from our country, was living somewhere in USA or Canada, with full disability for their mental illness, and a very fast internet connection. And they spent the whole day browsing our websites (the dozen major websites we had back then), participating in almost every discussion that contained some of their favorite keywords. And because of the difference in free time available and speed of internet connection, most admins were completely helpless. This person could create a new account and post hundred comments faster than the admins could use their slow modems to ban the account; and the avalanche continued for 16 hours a day, every day.

Yes, insane people have an asymmetrical advantage at online debates, because they spend less time reading and thinking. (In real life, too, but there at least they cannot teleport from one place to another.)