70 replies to this topic

[JC Daxion]

People always talk about openness and the lack of often, in this game and others. It seems like this is not an issue that PGI only has to deal with. I read this interesting article,. about the subject, and boy was it intersting.


Do you think that openness leads to more toxic or less toxic environments?

https://www.pcgamesn...-randall-tweets

[Scout Derek]

Complicated question. It depends on how a game is played and how people are influenced by those who project their gameplay to others.

Mainly one of the reasons why game communities are shaped is based off of those large leaders. Based off of their actions, does the community shape their way into the game. Per example, if a community is initially disgusted with how devs are handling the game and project it into the game, those who watch or listen will begin to listen to them.

There was a twitch streamer who was very toxic about the game, and towards PGI. about 100 people watched him when he played. He influenced those watchers by explaining and showing experience and opinion how PGI was not the best and needed to listen to the community more. Eventually he got banned due to causing some unusual trouble and his constant toxic remarks towards others, and now no one knows him.

Putting it short, I like to think that games become toxic due to those who play the game because they are showing that vulgar behavior or tactics are okay and can happen without consequence.

[Athom83]

Again its the case of the loud minority making the majority look like jerks. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ...

[Bombast]

I'm going to say no. Toxicity isn't related to openness.

Unless it's a company being open about it's rancid behavior. But that's not so much about the openness, is it.

[Sjorpha]

So lets compare two small developers and their communication, and what degrees of toxixity this has led to.

1. Bannerlord, taleworlds may not communicate that often or have open insight into their studio, but when they do communicate it is very very detailed and open about how and what is being done. They are also sharing their own development tools with the modding community and giving quite far reaching access to what can be modded. Their latest devblog is specifically about modding. Now while there is quite a bit of frustration going on about the game being delayed, there isn't any real toxicity towards the developers.

2. MWO, PGI has a curious way of interacting with their fanbase, sudden sparks of strange feedback sessions where the community gets to test often halfbaked and quite weird systemic changes that gets scrapped after the inevitable uproar over how weird and poorly implemented they are. And feedback sessions where a curated small selection is presented to Russ by two of his own employees, picking the nice questions and avoiding the hard ones, mixed with outbursts of verbal hype over upcoming "big things" which rarely come to fruition in the manner presented. And yes, there is huge amounts of toxicity from the player base.

Couldn't it possibly be about HOW the developer is communicating, and about how well the product is made and delivered, rather than about how much or how "open" the communication is?

Outrageous suggestion, I know, but I genuinely don't see how anyone can claim a direct causal link between openness and toxicity when there are multiple accounts both of openness without toxicity and toxicity without openness, they seem to exist independently and for different reasons, more to do with how than what is being done.

In the examples above I'm inclined to say that the huge difference in toxicity is due to the first developer just oozing talent and passion about their game and their fanbase with every step, and the second one coming off as incompetent and rather indifferent about their game and generally dismissive of their fanbase. This seems like a more plausible explanation to me, and I'd bet half a melon that the explanation for toxicity in other games is to be found in the details about the actual development and communication rather than in the degree of openness.

Edited by Sjorpha, 26 September 2017 - 12:57 PM.

[Jackal Noble]

IDK JC I'm going to go with neither of the above and fill in "other"

From what I've gathered in my experience with MWO community is a quirky (get it?) bunch and we have our moments, but are far far removed from some of the levels of toxicity you see in other, larger games. Some of it is probably from being a varied age group im sure.
If anything, when the devs decide to interact with us commoners they are shown respect.

[Nightbird]

Toxicity is mainly because the internet is anonymous, no consequences to poor conduct that would get you fired from your job for example. There's also the problem that the more uninformed someone is, the more certain they believe they are right about any topic.

[Johnny Z]

JC Daxion, on 26 September 2017 - 12:14 PM, said:

People always talk about openness and the lack of often, in this game and others. It seems like this is not an issue that PGI only has to deal with. I read this interesting article,. about the subject, and boy was it intersting.


Do you think that openness leads to more toxic or less toxic environments?

https://www.pcgamesn...-randall-tweets

I know for a fact unmoderated forums are fine. The Fallout 4 forum on Steam is basically unmoderated. Anyone can look for themselves how it is there.

There has been a giant fight on the Fallout 4 forums for the last few weeks over the Creation Club even. Quite entertaining.

MechWarrior Online forums are actually good for the most part going back to closed beta and entertaining and interesting also really. Minus a few things here and there.

I will add that much of the really aggressive behavior I have seen on forums, were actually efforts to bring moderation in or get a job doing moderation. Fallout 4 forum has completely ignored it from what I can tell.

Edited by Johnny Z, 26 September 2017 - 01:26 PM.

[Davegt27]

if you want to hear some openness
check out NGNG's pod casts
all the stuff they have done was talked about way before they did it
and they seem to be fairly open

https://soundcloud.com/nogutsnogalaxy

[Kiiyor]

I read that too, and I agree - it absolutely is related. I have some friends I went to Uni with that still work in the industry, some that have burnt out, and they pretty much all echo the sentiments in that article.

Here's the twitter dump for that article, bwt:

Spoiler

Devs are only human. Having your work crapped on by people who have absolutely no idea about the challenges of development must be incredibly draining.

"It can't be that hard"
"It's literally one line of code"
"I could write this in my sleep"
"They're just lazy"
"They're doing this on purpose"

Ugh.

There'll be some out there with actual programming experience ready to refute, but again, unless they've been in game development, they probably haven't had a legion of teenagers on youtube criticizing their hard work and wishing them a speedy death.

Compromises in most non-game application development go unnoticed - you don't see threats and villification crusades on twitter against the Microsoft Office team because they released new table colour schemes different to the old ones, or because there's bugs with some formula. Cut a corner in a game though, or (god forbid) show off a feature that later has to be cut, or sweet tapdancing jehovah if they ******* delay a game to polish out bugs, the collective outcry can shatter eardrums.

If you watch a youtube video about someone in starbucks ranting and complaining to some poor barista about the temperature of their latte, most of the comments will be criticizing and mocking the **** out of that person and their sense of entitlement. Yet if someone makes outright vile accusations and threats against a game developer, there's barely any space on the bandwagon.

Things here are better than they used to be. The MWO community is actually one of the more moderate and forebearing of those I've been a part of, though it wasn't always this way.

We used to talk, us and PGI, but burned our pridges from both ends long ago - and despite the popularity of PGI bashing and the vicious glee we adopt when we point out their mistakes, the majority of the blame can absolutely be laid at our feet, not theirs. People say things like "PGI have gotten far better over the years, but they left a lot of baggage for us to deal with" as if we the community were maliciously abused. Hell no. A few years ago, this place was ******* vile, and we treated the devs like ****. I would have pulled up stumps aeons before they did.

Yes, they absolutely could have handled things better, but they were also dealing with a forum where the voice of reason had been drowned out by an extremely vocal minority of uncompromising entitled ********. That first forum banwave should have rolled through far earlier than it did.

Are we better than we used to be? Heck yes. At least we get Chris posting a little now and then - but we'll probably drive him off too.

Now i've mad myself sad and bitter. Stupid meloncholy Kiiyor. I'm going to go watch kids fall off their bikes on youtube.

[Tyroki]

No no no.

There is a huge problem with his tweets.
While yes, there are idiots out there that do little more than demand a game be redesigned for them to enjoy, there are still plenty of reasons to be angry/hateful towards certain developers. Especially the scummy, seedy ones that screw people over in one way or another. Some circles will never forgive Randy Pitchford and Gearbox Software over their treatment of Alien's: Colonial Marines, for example. So long as you aren't yelling and screaming and threatening to hunt the douchenugget down, some degree of anger and distrust is a given.

The moment people stop being angry is when some devs win, and bad practices continue.

Charles Randall said that all practices people dislike are 'justifiable', but a whole bunch of those practices are disliked for bloody good reason. As it is, some idiots out there already accept the likes of microtransactions in fully priced games, as well as early DLC that is clearly part of a game, but was chopped out to make a quick 'buck'.

Yeah, I'll admit a large chunk of gamer culture is pretty toxic, but some of that was outright fostered by general incompetence and greed.

Edit: Also, for the love of the gods, being filtered down to a 5 year old level is incredibly annoying.

Edit 2: In PGI's case, they fostered anger through sheer incompetence and greed. Yes, they blamed the 'greed' part on their 'ex-publisher', yet the greed never truly went away. Honestly, if there was an alternative to this game that wasn't Gundam related, I'd probably be there.

Edited by Tyroki, 26 September 2017 - 02:34 PM.

[Davegt27]

Ghost Recon what a great game

I wonder if devs are not overly sensitive

I remember being in the middle east and we had to go to mission planning to pick
up the new JDAM software
I think the game guys have it a ton easier then some other software developers

[Bombast]

Davegt27, on 26 September 2017 - 02:36 PM, said:

I remember being in the middle east and we had to go to mission planning to pick
up the new JDAM software

Completely unrelated, I remember having to track down people who kept hooking up their 360s to our 'personal' satellite system in Iraq, and threatening them with hammers if they didn't stop.

If you want to see real toxicity, put a bunch of grown men in a warzone for 16 months and tank their internet. It gets ugly. Hammer ugly.

[MechaBattler]

I don't think openness effects in-game toxicity. Forum toxicity perhaps. But people are so critical that the truth will damn them faster than saying nothing at all. As for in-game toxicity. That's just a case of internet anonymity stripping away any sense of common decency. People flip out like a bad case of road rage. Has nothing to do the company's openness.

Also I noticed that Early Access games had good reviews early on along the lines of "Devs listen, great community", but then later reviews "Devs don't listen anymore, community is toxic now." My theory is that the smaller the community the more close knit it is, harder to be toxic when everyone knows you, makes people more self conscious. And the smaller a community, easier for devs to respond.

[Krivvan]

Eh, this has been one of the less toxic games I've played and seen frankly.

[Kiiyor]

Tyroki, on 26 September 2017 - 02:30 PM, said:

No no no. There is a huge problem with his tweets. While yes, there are idiots out there that do little more than demand a game be redesigned for them to enjoy, there are still plenty of reasons to be angry/hateful towards certain developers. Especially the scummy, seedy ones that screw people over in one way or another. Some circles will never forgive Randy Pitchford and Gearbox Software over their treatment of Alien's: Colonial Marines, for example. So long as you aren't yelling and screaming and threatening to hunt the douchenugget down, some degree of anger and distrust is a given. The moment people stop being angry is when some devs win, and bad practices continue. Charles Randall said that all practices people dislike are 'justifiable', but a whole bunch of those practices are disliked for bloody good reason. As it is, some idiots out there already accept the likes of microtransactions in fully priced games, as well as early DLC that is clearly part of a game, but was chopped out to make a quick 'buck'. Yeah, I'll admit a large chunk of gamer culture is pretty toxic, but some of that was outright fostered by general incompetence and greed. Edit: Also, for the love of the gods, being filtered down to a 5 year old level is incredibly annoying.

So the whole 'general incompetence and greed' thing is a brush you can tar a whole development team with? Same as scummy/seedy?

Most of the microtransactions and early DLC stuff you talk about are added because publishers and a board somewhere demand it be there. It makes money. There's little to no chance it's the fault of programmers, or designers, or community managers, or even the lead designer, yet they're the ones who cop the abuse. If they comment on something else related to their game, like mechanic X, or feature Y, which they actually worked on, it's overshadowed by the seething masses dragging it back to something they hate, and linking them to it.

Tyroki, on 26 September 2017 - 02:30 PM, said:

there are still plenty of reasons to be angry/hateful towards certain developers.

No no no. There really aren't.

There's no reason to be hateful at all.

You treat devs that way, you remove the chance of having any actual dialog with them because of things they likely can't control, and you probably remove any chance for future dialog about the things they can. Meanwhile, those in marketing, and those making the fiscal decisions designed to maximize profits don't care in the tiniest bit, because they'll still be making their money. They probably already dealt with the backlash from the development team as they went along. No-one wants to see their hard work marred by profiteering, but it's a fact of modern game development; micro transactions are generally by far the most profitable business model. Yo can bet that the higher ups on the actual dev team were battling with marketing the whole way through development to strike a happy medium.

Then they release their product and get called scummy and seedy.

[Bombast]

MechaBattler, on 26 September 2017 - 02:51 PM, said:

Also I noticed that Early Access games had good reviews early on along the lines of "Devs listen, great community", but then later reviews "Devs don't listen anymore, community is toxic now." My theory is that the smaller the community the more close knit it is, harder to be toxic when everyone knows you, makes people more self conscious. And the smaller a community, easier for devs to respond.

That may be the case sometimes, but not always. Early Access has been acquiring a reputation as a... 'questionable' business model for years now, to the point where a lot of people kind of wish Steam would do away with the whole mess. One need only look at a game like Ark Survival to see some seriously questionable moves that slowly soured the playerbase to the company as a whole, and thats a game people still like. It can get much worse (And I'm really fearful for 'We Happy Few' these days).

Edited by Bombast, 26 September 2017 - 03:04 PM.

[Jun Watarase]

JC Daxion, on 26 September 2017 - 12:14 PM, said:

People always talk about openness and the lack of often, in this game and others. It seems like this is not an issue that PGI only has to deal with. I read this interesting article,. about the subject, and boy was it intersting.


Do you think that openness leads to more toxic or less toxic environments?

https://www.pcgamesn...-randall-tweets

IIRC, there is ample research to indicate that consumers respond better to companies that engage them. This is part of the reason why many big companies are investing so heavily into social media prescences on facebook and twitter. Humans in general respond better when things are explained to them...take these two scenarios :

-Your boss tells you to do something that makes no sense and refuses to tell you why

-Your boss tells you to do something that makes no sense and explains why (goverment regulation, client wants it, etc)

Guess which scenario results in higher staff morale?

Of course explaining how they made a bad decision can lead to a death threat or whatever. The thing is, not explaining it ALSO leads to death threats. Infact, i would wager it leads to more because there is the impression that the devs are covering things up.

If you look at the gaming industry as a whole, i think you will notice that they actually do very little to no marketing research. Think of any MMO. It takes maybe 5-10 mins to throw together a quick poll to find out if your customer base wants a particular feature. I looked at Domino's twitter and they regularly do quick polls to find out if customers want a particular topping or menu item. That informaton is worth it's weight in gold and costs almost nothing for them to obtain.

Yet, almost no MMO will do this, let alone do focus groups or use any other typical marketing research technique. If you ask a game developer how they -know- that their customers wants X, Y or Z, they cannot show you any data that supports their hypothesis because they never conducted that marketing research in the first place. They will say things like "based on our experience...", "we believe..." or "players like X so we think they will like Y...", but they cannot actually show you any data saying "we did this survey and more than 90% of the respondents said they wanted X".

I have worked in companies before where if you tried to give that kind of ****** reasoning...your boss would simply ask you if you could predict the future and tell you to get back out there and get some evidence to support your proposal. Unfortunately, when devleopers ARE the boss...that doesn't happen and there is no oversight nor any requirement for evidence. Publishers get a lot of bad press for cost cutting and "ruining" a game, but what you often don't hear is that publishers often have to step in and tell developers to stop doing stupid stuff and actually produce a game.

IIRC Freelancer was supposed to be this insanely super ambitious self operating space universe where factions can wage war on each other without any player input and nothing was scripted, but development was going nowhere till Microsoft stepped in, replaced the project lead and told them to actually make a game already.

I mean, look at MWO, they literally just nerfed the DRG-1C. Name a single player that asked for a DRG-1C nerf. You can't find one. You cannot find a single post on the forums saying the DRG-1C was OP. It was never requested at any town hall meetings or whatever. It is something that PGI decided entirely on their own. Not a single player approved of this change. This is a classic example of marketing failure. Executives decide that something will be a great idea and don't stop to consider (or care) how their customers will react.

There was a time when Cadbury changed their formulae to use palm oil or something stupid as a cheaper substitute, although they claimed that consumers preferred the cheaper ingredient. Of course, they never could produce any proof that consumers asked for this, their sales tanked because their chocolate tasted worse, and they had to switch back to the old formulae in a hurry. This is what happens when marketing research is ignored because the executives want something and don't care about anything else (in this case, cut costs).

In general, developers appear to operate based on the premise of what THEY want rather than what they think CUSTOMERS want. You will notice that they never refer to players as customers...because "customer" implies they have some kind of purchasing power and influence over decisions. Developers really hate the idea of having to do something because the players want it. Ever read interviews with the developer of a video game title that bombed? Almost all of those interviews have the developer admit that the players wanted X but they insisted on doing Y because they wanted to be "different" or some such. The last C&C Tiberium game bombed because the fans wanted the usual base building RTS and the developers wanted a co-op strategy game where the focus was on controlling units. Result? Game bombed, millions of dollars lost. Why? Because the developers wanted to make a game for themselves, not for the market.

I think many developers approach game design from the perspective of "I want X" (because this is the game i want to make/play) rather than "the players want X". Sometimes developers fool themselves into thinking that whatever change they make is "better" for the game overall, which breaks one of marketing's core rules. If your customer base wants X, it literally does not matter whether you think Y will be better. If your players want a paint drying simulator, you GIVE them a paint drying simulator even if you think it's a dumb idea. You give them X because they pay your bills. See the Cadbury example for what happens when you think you know better. Or, you know, MWO and the DRG-1C nerf that not a single player wanted.

The gaming industry seems to think that marketing solely means advertising, like advertising in PCgamer, buying ad space, etc. That's a very, very, outmoded model. This is sad because the gaming industry has so many advantages at their fingertips. If Dominos had 1000+ enthusiastic pizza lovers on their forum talking about pizza every single day, their marketing department would have a field day. Effortless marketing and research. Look at a popular MMO forums like WOW or whatever...all that data is literally just sitting there to be sorted and compiled. No need to pay thousands of dollars to a marketing research company, you don't have to pay anyone to man a feedback hotline, it's practically free.

You will notice many smaller developers don't even have a marketing department...it's like one guy who does the advertising stuff on an ad-hoc basis, maybe a few developers will check their own forums every now and then. In PGI's case, it's basically Russ's twitter. That's their marketing research department. Clan XLs used to have no penalty for losing a side torso...people on the forums spent month trying to tell PGI there should be one...all that feedback was completely ignored until someone in Russ's inner circle tweeted the idea to him on twitter. BAM, the change goes live next patch.

It's not that PGI was afraid of death threats if they had actually paid attention to feedback on their forums...it was that they actively chose not to because they believed they knew better. You will notice that every change they make is founded on the belief that they think they know better, which is why we get changes like "The DRG-1C is overperforming even though Battlemasters are the most popular IS mech". Unfortunately, when the developers don't play their own game and have no idea what people bring in actual matches, this belief is almost always unfounded.

Further proof : I tried asking on a forum frequented by game developers if they used any marketing research techniques. Every single developer that responded refused to even confirm whether they used any. Not a single one was willing to say "yes" or list a single example. Pretty clear cut proof that they don't do any marketing research whatsoever. Ask Pepsi, Coke, or any mainstream company that same question and you would get a confident "Of course!" answer. But not a single game developer will admit to using marketing research, because their decisions are made based on what they want rather than what their customers want.

Obviously, developers can't actually admit this in public. It makes them look bad if they come out and say "Yea, you know how we nerfed the weakest character class in the game last patch? Our bad, not a single player wanted that change but we put it in because we wanted it." So they hide the reason behind a layer of obscurity (even though plenty of scientific research shows this to be a bad idea), and when the real reason is "a developer got PKed by someone playing the weakest class in the game and raged" (cough dragon knockdowns in beta), they can't admit it. Of course the professional thing to do would be to make decisions based entirely on sound logic and backed up by evidence of what your customers want, but the gaming industry just doesn't have that culture.

Ever been in a situation where one of your managers goes "ooohhh i think it will be a great idea if we do X!" and you KNOW it's dumb and going to fail, but nothing you say can change their mind? That's pretty much how the gaming industry operates.

Edited by Jun Watarase, 26 September 2017 - 03:59 PM.

[Tyroki]

Kiiyor, on 26 September 2017 - 02:59 PM, said:

So the whole 'general incompetence and greed' thing is a brush you can tar a whole development team with? Same as scummy/seedy?

Most of the microtransactions and early DLC stuff you talk about are added because publishers and a board somewhere demand it be there. It makes money. There's little to no chance it's the fault of programmers, or designers, or community managers, or even the lead designer, yet they're the ones who cop the abuse. If they comment on something else related to their game, like mechanic X, or feature Y, which they actually worked on, it's overshadowed by the seething masses dragging it back to something they hate, and linking them to it.



No no no. There really aren't.

There's no reason to be hateful at all.

You treat devs that way, you remove the chance of having any actual dialog with them because of things they likely can't control, and you probably remove any chance for future dialog about the things they can. Meanwhile, those in marketing, and those making the fiscal decisions designed to maximize profits don't care in the tiniest bit, because they'll still be making their money. They probably already dealt with the backlash from the development team as they went along. No-one wants to see their hard work marred by profiteering, but it's a fact of modern game development; micro transactions are generally by far the most profitable business model. Yo can bet that the higher ups on the actual dev team were battling with marketing the whole way through development to strike a happy medium.

Then they release their product and get called scummy and seedy.

Hmm. Used the wrong words. It's okay to be angry toward a Development Studio. Actions can destroy trust and both good faith and feeling. Most DEVELOPERS don't get much of a choice. Someone (or a group of people) are the ones making the bad decisions that everyone else has to follow.

In terms of word use though, there is a bit of a problem there, as both the 'development studio' and the 'developers' themselves are often referred to as the 'developers'. Likely as development studio (or company) is long and people prefer shorter words.

Anyway. Your first point only applies to developers (heh) under the thumb of a publisher. However, there are smaller, more indie groups that have pulled off some rather scummy things themselves.
In the end, the big thing to remember is that one way or another, everyone that is part of the industry is out to make money. Some companies aren't total jerks about it (Larian Studios, for example). Quite a few are.
It's hard these days not to be intensely jaded, angry, etc.

The thing is though, when a publisher or developer screws everyone over in one way or another by doing scummy things, who is the correct person to be angry at? And what exactly do you do when no one even remotely close to being in charge wants to listen?

I'm sure we can all agree that death threats are about 3-4 steps too damn far though.

Overall though, it's pretty easy to see why there is a push in the industry to move away from publishers (if the studio can afford to)

[Tyroki]

Jun Watarase, on 26 September 2017 - 03:44 PM, said:

IIRC, there is ample research to indicate that consumers respond better to companies that engage them. This is part of the reason why many big companies are investing so heavily into social media prescences on facebook and twitter. Humans in general respond better when things are explained to them...take these two scenarios :

-Your boss tells you to do something that makes no sense and refuses to tell you why

-Your boss tells you to do something that makes no sense and explains why (goverment regulation, client wants it, etc)

Guess which scenario results in higher staff morale?

Of course explaining how they made a bad decision can lead to a death threat or whatever. The thing is, not explaining it ALSO leads to death threats. Infact, i would wager it leads to more because there is the impression that the devs are covering things up.

If you look at the gaming industry as a whole, i think you will notice that they actually do very little to no marketing research. Think of any MMO. It takes maybe 5-10 mins to throw together a quick poll to find out if your customer base wants a particular feature. I looked at Domino's twitter and they regularly do quick polls to find out if customers want a particular topping or menu item. That informaton is worth it's weight in gold and costs almost nothing for them to obtain.

Yet, almost no MMO will do this, let alone do focus groups or use any other typical marketing research technique. If you ask a game developer how they -know- that their customers wants X, Y or Z, they cannot show you any data that supports their hypothesis because they never conducted that marketing research in the first place. They will say things like "based on our experience...", "we believe..." or "players like X so we think they will like Y...", but they cannot actually show you any data saying "we did this survey and more than 90% of the respondents said they wanted X".

I have worked in companies before where if you tried to give that kind of ****** reasoning...your boss would simply ask you if you could predict the future and tell you to get back out there and get some evidence to support your proposal. Unfortunately, when devleopers ARE the boss...that doesn't happen and there is no oversight nor any requirement for evidence. Publishers get a lot of bad press for cost cutting and "ruining" a game, but what you often don't hear is that publishers often have to step in and tell developers to stop doing stupid stuff and actually produce a game.

IIRC Freelancer was supposed to be this insanely super ambitious self operating space universe where factions can wage war on each other without any player input and nothing was scripted, but development was going nowhere till Microsoft stepped in, replaced the project lead and told them to actually make a game already.

I mean, look at MWO, they literally just nerfed the DRG-1C. Name a single player that asked for a DRG-1C nerf. You can't find one. You cannot find a single post on the forums saying the DRG-1C was OP. It was never requested at any town hall meetings or whatever. It is something that PGI decided entirely on their own. Not a single player approved of this change. This is a classic example of marketing failure. Executives decide that something will be a great idea and don't stop to consider (or care) how their customers will react.

There was a time when Cadbury changed their formulae to use palm oil or something stupid as a cheaper substitute, although they claimed that consumers preferred the cheaper ingredient. Of course, they never could produce any proof that consumers asked for this, their sales tanked because their chocolate tasted worse, and they had to switch back to the old formulae in a hurry. This is what happens when marketing research is ignored because the executives want something and don't care about anything else (in this case, cut costs).

In general, developers appear to operate based on the premise of what THEY want rather than what they think CUSTOMERS want. You will notice that they never refer to players as customers...because "customer" implies they have some kind of purchasing power and influence over decisions. Developers really hate the idea of having to do something because the players want it. Ever read interviews with the developer of a video game title that bombed? Almost all of those interviews have the developer admit that the players wanted X but they insisted on doing Y because they wanted to be "different" or some such. The last C&C Tiberium game bombed because the fans wanted the usual base building RTS and the developers wanted a co-op strategy game where the focus was on controlling units. Result? Game bombed, millions of dollars lost. Why? Because the developers wanted to make a game for themselves, not for the market.

I think many developers approach game design from the perspective of "I want X" (because this is the game i want to make/play) rather than "the players want X". Sometimes developers fool themselves into thinking that whatever change they make is "better" for the game overall, which breaks one of marketing's core rules. If your customer base wants X, it literally does not matter whether you think Y will be better. If your players want a paint drying simulator, you GIVE them a paint drying simulator even if you think it's a dumb idea. You give them X because they pay your bills. See the Cadbury example for what happens when you think you know better. Or, you know, MWO and the DRG-1C nerf that not a single player wanted.

The gaming industry seems to think that marketing solely means advertising, like advertising in PCgamer, buying ad space, etc. That's a very, very, outmoded model. This is sad because the gaming industry has so many advantages at their fingertips. If Dominos had 1000+ enthusiastic pizza lovers on their forum talking about pizza every single day, their marketing department would have a field day. Effortless marketing and research. Look at a popular MMO forums like WOW or whatever...all that data is literally just sitting there to be sorted and compiled. No need to pay thousands of dollars to a marketing research company, you don't have to pay anyone to man a feedback hotline, it's practically free.

You will notice many smaller developers don't even have a marketing department...it's like one guy who does the advertising stuff on an ad-hoc basis, maybe a few developers will check their own forums every now and then. In PGI's case, it's basically Russ's twitter. That's their marketing research department. Clan XLs used to have no penalty for losing a side torso...people on the forums spent month trying to tell PGI there should be one...all that feedback was completely ignored until someone in Russ's inner circle tweeted the idea to him on twitter. BAM, the change goes live next patch.

It's not that PGI was afraid of death threats if they had actually paid attention to feedback on their forums...it was that they actively chose not to because they believed they knew better. You will notice that every change they make is founded on the belief that they think they know better, which is why we get changes like "The DRG-1C is overperforming even though Battlemasters are the most popular IS mech". Unfortunately, when the developers don't play their own game and have no idea what people bring in actual matches, this belief is almost always unfounded.

Further proof : I tried asking on a forum frequented by game developers if they used any marketing research techniques. Every single developer that responded refused to even confirm whether they used any. Not a single one was willing to say "yes" or list a single example. Pretty clear cut proof that they don't do any marketing research whatsoever. Ask Pepsi, Coke, or any mainstream company that same question and you would get a confident "Of course!" answer. But not a single game developer will admit to using marketing research, because their decisions are made based on what they want rather than what their customers want.

Obviously, developers can't actually admit this in public. It makes them look bad if they come out and say "Yea, you know how we nerfed the weakest character class in the game last patch? Our bad, not a single player wanted that change but we put it in because we wanted it." So they hide the reason behind a layer of obscurity (even though plenty of scientific research shows this to be a bad idea), and when the real reason is "a developer got PKed by someone playing the weakest class in the game and raged" (cough dragon knockdowns in beta), they can't admit it. Of course the professional thing to do would be to make decisions based entirely on sound logic and backed up by evidence of what your customers want, but the gaming industry just doesn't have that culture.

Ever been in a situation where one of your managers goes "ooohhh i think it will be a great idea if we do X!" and you KNOW it's dumb and going to fail, but nothing you say can change their mind? That's pretty much how the gaming industry operates.

Sorry to double post, but damn. That's a nice wall of text you have there.
Good read too.

Still, you reminded me of the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta.
We TOLD them, over and over, thread after thread that the game was NOT ready for release.
Holy crap was it not ready for release.
The balance of everything available was waaaay off, bugs everywhere, some parts of the game barely even playable.

What happened? We were told that we were 'gamers', and that we 'knew nothing at all' and 'didn't know what we wanted', while the devs 'knew what they were doing' and 'knew what we wanted', and that we should 'shut up' and take what we were given.

Game released. Boy, unsurprisingly, it was a rough as hell launch, and was pretty damn rough for quite a while before they finally fixed things to be worth playing.
Before you ask: No. After that post, I refused to get the game.
I was already leaning against because of how rough the game was.

Solid example.
Granted they were on a deadline, but gods that game needed more time in the oven, and that post... the sheer levels of arrogance in that post were just stupid and ridiculously offputting.