Gaming

If you can't tell the difference between being upset that a game was made badly and being cruel to the developers, you may need to take a step back.

Of course there are innocent people, what the fuck.

Be gleeful about it failing to sell, yes. But don't be cruel. Don't be glad that people who did their jobs have lost their jobs because a CEO wants to preserve investors' profits. All the bad decisions that made the game what it was, in a huge company like EA or Ubisoft, were probably because of upper management and not because the people who lose their jobs did their jobs poorly.

Dunk the game on reviews, tell your friends it sucks, hell even laugh at the grumbling of the pre-orderers or the captive audience of fans who will die on the hill. But don't be cruel.

Be(e) kind.

Wait.. when was this? Who did this?

I know of some specific instances of like community managers or a single employee clapping back. Apparently they speak for every employee and the entire studio? Is that how this works?

This just reminding that Postal is the cause of all the violence because we played games on certain hardware. I'm pretty sure at the time if they had ISIS terrorist attacks they would blamed Postal as the cause.

There's a difference between being unhappy about a game and making your voice heard to the studio/publisher responsible, and singling out individuals who worked on the game to harass. This happens a lot with voice actors being targeted because people don't like their performance, despite them just doing what the voice director told them to do.

There's also a difference between saying "I don't like ____" or "this game sucks" versus "I'm glad you got laid off, serves you right" or straight-up death threats. Just like the VAs, the development staff were working at the direction of the lead/director, who were possibly working at the direction of the publisher, so directing vitriol towards individuals is likely not productive, on top of being cruel. You are certainly allowed to make your opinion heard, but don't be an asshole about it.

I think they make a valid point that there's a difference between critique and criticism.

$70 is a lot to spend on a game for most people, so people want to feel they got their money's worth, but you have to admit that the internet does have a bad habit of turning everything into hyperbole.

Still, a company with a multiple million dollar budget should be able to produce something truly amazing, especially when there's indie devs and publishers that make truly memorable gems for what's a comparatively shoestring budget.

If the big companies want to have more critiques and less criticism, perhaps they should start listening to players instead of producers.

NES games cost $60-$70 nearly 40 years ago. That would be like $150 if adjusted for inflation.

And if anything, the scale and cost of developing video games has skyrocketed since then...

Just something to consider...