The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

Why? Because it is devoutly to be wished that you’re a human being with a brain, conscience, and at least a scrap of both empathy and perspective. If you’re so antisocial that you honestly believe that what you described merits abuse, threats, doxxing, etc... you shouldn’t be allowed online by your guardian.

Messing with your beloved IP is not cause to abuse people. An over-dependence on a given entertainment format to calm you is not their problem. Games are, and have been for a long dammed time, mass market entertainment. Mass market. That your particular gospel isn’t being played as constantly as you require it should be, is no one else’s problem, neither should your entitlement be their problem, nor is it license to be rude, cruel, or threatening to people you don’t even really know.

Besides, and this is the main point... your options are not the false dichotomy of “be nice” or “be abusive.” Try ignoring stuff you dislike, or expressing your concerns in constructive ways when it’s not hurting people. Try to remember that being a consumer of something doesn’t mean that anyone owes you more of the same. If your local decides to go vegan and alcohol free, that may suck for you, but they still didn’t owe you anything.

I’d be with you on one point: the endless lines from AAA publishers which amount to, “We released half of a broken game, haha, we already have your money and future updates will only be planned DLC and mometization...” but you’re using it to excuse inexcusable behavior.

And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't.

Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.

Some F2P is really good and improves the product. (Warframe) That's the exception however and most of it is in fact abusive. As such people upset about it don't expect constructive criticism to get anywhere and engage in behavior that amounts to, in their view, "eye for an eye".

Surprisingly, the part of the article that comes close to talking about what you brought up gets very little coverage and doesn't start the article (burying the lede). There too, according to the article, those posts (which you refer to) make up "an even smaller proportion". So those posts which might justifiably concern not only aren't featured prominently in the article, but constitute an indefinably smaller portion of what was already vaguely described as small. One has to wonder why the language you're talking about isn't the basis for the article. Seems a shame to focus on petty namecalling if publishing someone else's address presumably to encourage the public to shame or harass them in person or to "try and find their family" (quoting the article) presumably for some in-person dealing is commonplace. I don't know if that's the case, and neither your reply nor the article help anyone determine how frequent that is.

The article claims "What I’m drawing attention to here is the normalisation of online abuse — both from the perspective of content creators and from the point of view of the audience. It is now, for a significant part of our audience, the way in which they communicate with creators.". That's an evidenceless innumerate claim from the article which very much needs some backing. We simply aren't given information we need to make sense of the claims. What constitutes "normalisation"? How much is "significant"?

But what we are given is propaganda -- "creators" -- a word used to compare the programmer to a deity so as to "elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people" (as https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Creator explains), which is preposterous. They're programmers or software developers, working people who sometimes write programs some people don't like and less than 1% of whom (we're told) express themselves very poorly.

You are going well beyond the article with your evidenceless claims about the police, police resources, and everyone's speech rights.