Thank you Jason. One thing I hate most about the gamer community is the lack of understanding that developer /= publisher (or marketing). This thread is full of idiots who can’t make that distinction, and frankly they can all go to hell. It’s the primary reason why I left the game industry after two decades. Why put…

Of course you’re right that video game publishers do some shady things, be it stuffing their games with microtransactions, showing off generous E3 demos when they know the game won’t look even close to as good, or — worst of all — exploiting labor practices to get unpaid overtime out of all of their workers.

That’s the thing. You’re talking about marketing people. For every Peter Molyneux making ambitious promises to the press, there are 100 developers under him who not only have to deal with cleaning up the mess but also have to watch posters on Reddit and NeoGAF call them all liars.

But here’s the rub: all the stuff you ever wanted to know about game development would be out there if not for the toxic gaming community. We *love* to talk about development, the challenges we face, the problems we solve, the shortcuts we take. But it’s almost never worth it.

Or, and hear me out on this one...

Game developers: have you ever felt like you couldn’t be candid because of toxic culture?

A fellow dev of mine works on a really popular (read: top 10 on steam) game, and is on Twitter a lot. Even when he tweets really benign things, the first comments are some variation of “fuck you, fix ur game” or “why are you talking about xyz when you could be doing abc in the game bitch.”

Biggest example, gamers who think “DLC” automatically means the content was removed from the main game just to make a quick buck.