- Developers of Cities: Skylines 2 have noticed a growing toxicity in their community, which is affecting engagement and creativity.
- The CEO of Colossal Order expressed concern about the negative impact of toxicity on the team and the community.
- The developers still encourage helpful criticism from the community but ask for it to be constructive and kind.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/mVaIY
See I still disagree; Im Australian and we measure a lot of things (social, political) by what we call the pub test.
If you can’t convince people in a pub that something is a good idea then it doesn’t pass the political pub test.
The social pub test is similar, it’s where if doing something in a pub would cause another patron to throw you a beating it fails the pub test.
If you rip someone off for $60 to $120 in a pub and they realise they will punch your head in.
Mean comments are an entirely reasonable if somewhat juvenile response to being lied to and ripped off.
Devs acting like victims because people said mean things after they lied to and ripped those people off is ridiculous.
They should grow a thicker skin or get out of the game of scamming people.
While I don’t think that being an asshole about something is a reasonable response, I find it a very understandable response, especially about subjects like this. Regardless of how “turn the other cheek” I happen to be personally, the issues surrounding video game marketing are pretty large, and this sort of cycle of selling a product that doesn’t match its marketed features and level of polish happens far more than it should.
The only thing I feel bad about when it comes to agreeing with your outlook is that there totally are developers who technically work for the parent company receiving toxicity, but had nothing to do with deciding how polished the game could be at release, what top level features the game could receive, or how the game could be marketed, but still end up receiving toxicity for the state of the game because they still are the devs, and if you go down the path of “getting out of the game” when it comes to those people, they may not have ever known it would end up that way when they took the job, or they may need that job to survive.
That grey area is the one part that gives me pause, and it’s the reason I think companies at large pull that card, because you can never prove that the public isn’t hurting innocents, and even though you could look at a case like this, establish that you can’t see any toxicity or death threats in forums, and decide that the company is lying about toxicity existing at all, they may have deleted those posts, continuing to muddy the waters.
It’s just a fucked up situation all round and there’s no black and white answer to it, for me. I think being a manager at my job has hard taught me that sinking to someone’s level when it comes to emotional response is absolutely never a good idea, and that’s bled out to other areas of my life, but I can understand your outlook and agree to disagree on how we’d react to this situation individually.