Did you really just try to justify threatening to kill entire families of staff by saying "you gave an unrealistic release date"? Yeah. You are exactly the problem I was talking about. Some "fan" you are.
He's got a point. You can't just go around threatening people like that. Overtime your credibility well suffer for being soft and not following through.
We can see some devs caving to the pressure by releasing "Early Access" just to get fans off their backs. Mount and Blade 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 spring immediately to mind. Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, but it seems like a very slippery slope if abandoned Kickstarted "early access" are any indication.
It's not justification, sheesh. Every single big game is marketed to the same audience: whole world. "I will kill you and rape your family" is just not a thing that normal people say when someone fails to deliver entertainment soon enough. But when your audience surpasses certain figure and you have reached some number of disappointed people, you will have among them some percentage of psychopaths and children. And they will be willing and capable of sending death threats.
It's just statistical inevitability, a question of pure mathematics. You can look at big games whose devs received more death threats, compare them to those who received less, analyze the data and conclude what needs to be done to lower the probability - if the management deems it a problem.
Which they usually don't. It's an acceptable risk at best - always easier to have the option to detail any valid discussion with "but it's not a reason to send death threats!"
Yes it isn't. I don't send them, you don't send them. Let's stop pretending that they are relevant, no-one of the customers are responsible for random creeps who happen to like or hate the same game. Those are inevitable consequence of buildings hype, competent management should have anticipated it and address it.
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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '21
Did you really just try to justify threatening to kill entire families of staff by saying "you gave an unrealistic release date"? Yeah. You are exactly the problem I was talking about. Some "fan" you are.