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Cities: Skylines 2 developers have noticed 'a growing tendency of toxicity in our community' (www.techradar.com)

submitted 10 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to c/games@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] bouh@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech. Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.

What I don't understand is the trolls who hate on stuff forever. Like cyberpunk 2077 for example still has haters who miss absolutely no occasion to shit on the game.

[-] Renacles@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Upper management is always full of the slimiest people out there, I just don't think that justifies the hate towards devs who just want to make a game and already have to put up with said upper management.

[-] bouh@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago

That's basic relationship stuff : game studios broke player trust. It's up to them to win it back.

Now different people react differently to the break of trust. Some do react poorly to it. But I won't blame people, and I won't sympathise with studios I don't already trust.

[-] Renacles@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Again, studios are just a bunch of people passionate to make cool games except for cases like The Day Before.

[-] bouh@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

And sometimes they're also assholes that disrespect players. Sometimes they're too leniant and think a buggy mess is a game worth releasing. That's disrespect. Being small is not an excuse to release an alpha version.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago

What you say actually mixes two quite distinct things, I feel:

Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech.

I disagree with this, and quite harshly so. Independent of what companies do, and some of the releases very much fit the "not respecting" part, that's not in any way, shape or form an excuse to be abuse to some poor support or outreach rep who has to read your shit. They're just doing their job, they haven't even gotten to the playing-a-video-game-in-my-leisure-time part of the day yet.

Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.

That is however quite true, and leads to an extreme echo chamber enforcing and reinforcing negative and abuse comments. It gets clicks, which is ad impressions, so it gets lifted to the top.

[-] bouh@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I'm not saying the behaviour of the game studios justify people hate. I'm saying it fuels it.

The relationship between a game company and a player base is not a equal one. And I'm not saying all game studios are responsible, but you only need enough of them to behave poorly for people to grow defiance for all of them.

And in this, it's up to the developers to win back players trust, not to players to forgive game dev blindly.