According to industry veteran and publisher Mike Wilson, the gaming community can funnel off quite a bit of abuse and frustration to developers when it comes to lengthy production and small indie teams.
Speaking to Reboot Develop last week indie teams are expected to have mass engagement with thousands of gamers as they engage in development – this becomes even more difficult when they are up against ignorance and intolerance by players clueless about the production process.
“The biggest problem is they’re now expected to have direct conversations with their audience on a regular basis throughout,” said Wilson, who co-founded Devolver Digital and Good Shepard, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. “That’s something that no other artist in the history of making art has had to figure out.
“These are already people trying to do something very hard: make a game that stands out from the thousand games coming out each month with just two or three people, and knowing that the audience will never understand it’s just two or three people. They’ll just assume it’s some big studio and should be as good as [bigger] games.
“The gaming community is… great at being complete fucking assholes online, and I don’t understand why that is. When you’re having a hard day and there’s a thousand people on Twitter at any time willing to agree that you’re a piece of shit, that you should stop working because you’re never going to make anything good, it’s pretty hardcore for a sensitive person.”
“I think that’s why the indies are having such a hard time,” he added. “It’s just this mass of noise from a mix of fans and monsters online. And it doesn’t matter if you read a thousand great comments, it’s that one or two that say you’re an absolute worthless piece of shit that sticks in your heart when you least need it.”
Unfortunately, that is how the internet is at the end of the day, it a disconnect from real human interaction. People have an easier time talking shit when they don’t have to see the respondents reaction in real life.
Source VG247
