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

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 9 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.