From 2018 case (just google "riot farting" honestly):
https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/6454fy6neo6mwj3w/images/5-7...> Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two.
The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though.
If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players.
Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.
