I’m talking about the increasing tendency with which community feedback is influencing game development, and the unexpected consequences that result.
On the surface, it seems like a perfectly reasonable idea — improve the game by asking the gamers what they want. Yet, if you visit almost any online game’s forums, you’ll find anger, toxicity, and general butthurt-ness thriving. The incessant rabble found on these boards begs the question of whether community feedback is actually improving our games or not.
Earlier this year, I watched as NavyField 2 — a small, Korean-developed naval warfare sim — withered and died in a matter of months. The cause of death: the developers’ adherence to community feedback.
Though far from the best team, NavyField 2’s devs impressed me with their responses to community feedback, even through language barriers and lack of resources. Yet, the more they responded to the community’s demands, the angrier people seemed to get.
No matter what changes or improvements they made to the game, players accused the devs of ignoring the community’s wishes, or of listening to the wrong people, or just making the wrong decisions altogether. The devs were simultaneously considered guilty of not listening to the community at all, and of listening too much.
Naturally, any update or patch in any game tends to draw some resistance, but this was different. People actually began leaving the game in droves, and continued stoking the forum flames that burned the developers for giving the players exactly what they asked for.
NavyField 2 is far from the only game to experience this kind of strife. More recently, prominent YouTubers in the Warframe community have been voicing similar gripes. Like many others across the world of online gaming, they criticize the developers for listening too much to a “vocal minority” of forum denizens. But with so many games supposedly being derailed by vocal minorities, the only ones to blame are those in the silent majority who refuse to speak.
Too often these days, game development reminds me of our current political climate. Proposed changes are put to a vote, and no matter the outcome, people are pissed off. Countless gamers claim to speak for their respective communities, yet apparently none do. Visceral arguments are fought and communities divided over such trivial issues as who supports a given patch or update, and who does not.
There’s also reason to believe that this new, democratic approach to game development is impacting the quality of our games. In NavyField 2’s case, the players’ demands led to, among other things, a colossal increase in the rate at which players gained experience. People finished their grinds in under a month and had nothing else to do, further contributing to the game’s decline.
Of course, some devs are better than others when it comes to weeding out the bad suggestions from the good, as should be their responsibility. Devs who choose to encourage community feedback must respect the enormous difficulty of verifying what is and is not the correct feedback, and approach this task with appropriate expertise.
Gamers will always voice their opinions and argue with each other over changes to their favorite games. But the crucial issue is deciding to what degree such arguments should influence the development of these games. Sometimes, we gamers simply have to admit that we don’t always know what’s best for a game’s prosperity.
