This seemed like a logical follow-up to my previous post. There is a horrific disease that runs rampant through the industry. That disease causes people to act like ass-hats and prevents any sort of meaningful progress to be made. That disease, is an overgrown and misplaced sense of entitlement.
First, let's look at the primary carriers of this disease; the players. For some reason, a specific group of gamers have begun emerging in droves over the past couple years. This group, for some reason, believes that games are made easily, made cheaply, and are supposed to be made to meet their individual specifications. Of course, developers are going to try and make a game that appeals to as many people as possible. But there's never enough time, enough manpower, or enough money to give everyone everything they want. Even if they could, they shouldn't really need to appease everyone, especially since these requests are often baseless and lacking any sort of real thought. I once saw someone ask if Gearbox was going to implement a Gears of War type cover system in Borderlands. At which point, I quietly shut down my computer, stood up from my desk, and immediately went upstairs and went to bed. My day needed to end after reading something like that.
The problem with situations like the one I just described, is that the people that are making the suggestions (and often speaking the loudest) are the people that have not researched the game they are trying to "improve", know nothing of actual game design, and more often than not, cannot form a whole sentence that is grammatically stable. Social media has done wonders for game developers as both an advertising tool and a method of communicating with their player base. Unfortunately, it also allows far too many people to post things like "add dis gun fur free or elz I stahp playin." Its too much effort for people to make a clear and well written argument as to why a feature should be added, yet they are the first ones to complain about how long something is taking, or how lazy the developers are because their desired feature has not yet been added. These are the same people that go to indie development pages/sites and say "how can I make a game?" That's it? No more information? Are you trying to make a particular type of game? Any specific features you had in mind? It speaks to how accessible this industry has become (in both a good and a bad way) that people think they can just sit down and make a game. It doesn't work that way. Games take months of planning, mounds of technical knowledge, a cohesive team environment, and more often than not, a lot of money. The sooner more people begin to understand this, the better off the gaming community will be. That's not to try and dissuade people from becoming indie developers. I'm trying to get there myself. But I've spent many many hours watching tutorials, studying workflows and asset pipelines, and have written tons of documentation. Guess what? From a technical knowledge standpoint, I am sub-par when compared to most professional developers.
Now, to be fair, I'd like to examine the other side of this disease. Unfortunately, developers themselves seem to become afflicted from time to time. A development team is bringing their vision to life, and they are not obligated to appease anyone with their creation really. However, since creating a product that people enjoy is how they feed their families and stay in business, it is important for them to listen to solid feedback. There are far too many developers out there that have gotten too big for their britches and ignore overwhelming feedback from long time customers (we buy a product, we ARE customers), who state that a gameplay mechanic is either broken just not fun. I feel like the publishers that loom over developers and push release dates and ramble on about share holders are partially to blame for these situations. However, developers still need to be in tune with the wants of their communities. It is virtually impossible to make a game that will please everyone. But, if swarms of your fans are saying that a new concept doesn't work, or are telling you to bring some new concepts to life because you have gotten stale, you should probably listen. There have been several situations lately where this has occurred, and to their credit, the developers have eventually gotten the message and changed things for the better, but the mark has been left and a reliable group of customers have suddenly become wary of any future products you release.
Let's make this simple. Gamers; unless you buy a game based on the promise of certain included features, and those features are missing, developers don't really owe it to you to implement everything you want, just because you want it. Developers are people with families and goals and passions, and they do not exist just to make you happy. Developers; if the people that regularly buy your products stop buying your products because you didn't listen to clear and concise feedback, you have no one to blame but yourselves. Your customers are the ones that make sure you get paycheck, so always keep your ear to the ground, even if you have to listen to absolute nonsense some of the time.
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