The gaming community is a passionate and vocal, albeit sensitive group. They will sing their praise when a great game comes out, but they will also start a witch-hunt if a game generates a lot of hype, only to disappoint. Hardcore gamers take their hobby seriously, and they are so opinionated that little makes it below their radar. Good or bad, this is the current state of the community that developers have to deal with.
If you want the hardcore gaming community to like your product, you have to work for it. And if you want them to hate you… that’s actually pretty easy to achieve. Just make a bad game. Or make a game with a lot of potential, only to then sort of give up once it’s released. Or don’t take the players’ feedback into consideration. Or falsely advertise a game. There are a lot of ways to piss off hardcore gamers.
A customer named Dave ordered two Avenger Playstation 3 controllers nearly two months before Christmas, and was informed that they would arrive in time for the holiday. When the arrival date came and went, Dave reached out to the product’s PR manager, Paul Christoforo, a man who is now infamous for the way he handled the situation. Dave’s emails were polite, and he even restated that he was honestly just excited and eager to get his hands on his new controller.
Paul’s immature responses were as uncalled for as they were unprofessional. At one point Paul told Dave to “put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else.” He then name-dropped a bunch of huge companies and business owners in order to make himself seem important. The owner of PAX intervened, disavowing Paul completely. The situation got worse and worse until Paul was terminated from N-Control and publicly shamed on the internet. Don’t be like Paul.
And of course, there is Half-Life 3. This game has been at the top of gamers’ most-wanted list for years now, and still to this day, it is shrouded in rumors and mystery. Even the most reliable articles about the game’s potential release begin with phrases like “rumor has it.”
Gamers don’t like to be left in the dark, especially when it comes to a long-awaited and long-overdue game like Half-Life 3. I mean, there are multiple subreddits that just wonder whether or not the game will ever really come out.
The Playstation came out on time, with a full arsenal of great games, and plenty of advertising and hype-generation beforehand. Unsurprisingly, the Sega Saturn failed quickly and completely.
Players got pissed. They ranted on Reddit, and they blamed the game’s creator, Sean Murray, of basically lying to them. It got to the point that Twitch and Sony themselves were giving out refunds, regardless of the number of hours played. This didn’t last long though, likely from the sheer number of people getting the full refund.
Pokemon Go took the world by storm. It introduced ground-breaking AR technology, unprecedented player interaction, and a heavy dose of nostalgia. For what it is—a game that involves walking around in the real world and repeatedly throwing Poke Balls at fictional monsters—the game is a lot of fun. However, because the game is so great, its servers were bombarded right off the bat, causing server issues for the first week of the game’s launch. Then there were bugs that needed fixing. Then the players kept thinking up different ways that the game could be better. And they took this all out on Niantic, the game’s developer.
If you consider yourself a hardcore gamer, you’ve no-doubt caught yourself talking about a game as if you know more than the people who created the damned thing. They could do this better, or that better, and why don’t they just fix everything!? If developers are smart, they will listen to all of that feedback. Even if they aren’t going to act on it, players like knowing they’re being heard. This wasn’t the case when Niantic answered many of these concerns with silence, or by fixing minor issues, and leaving the big ones be. I’m talking, of course, about the ever-flawed tracking system, in light of the recent “buddy system” (which honestly isn’t all that great).
Final Fantasy Record Keeper is a little-known mobile game developed by Square Enix and DeNA. It’s a great game that is very frequently updated, nostalgia-heavy, and very busy in terms of events and new features. The gameplay is fantastic, and the game’s players love it. But earlier this year, DeNA did something that was really shady, greedy, and showed a very bad side of what free-to-play games could be.
As a free-to-play game, FFRK has purchasable currency that can be used to gamble for items. What DeNA did was alter drop rates for the most hyped banner in the game’s history, leading players to believe drop rates would be the same as they had been for months. People spent money, but were mislead. It wasn’t so much a lie as it was giving players false expectations. The issue was taken much more seriously, however, because money was involved.
As a rule, don’t be dishonest or disrespectful to the people who are buying your product. This goes double for hardcore gamers. Gaming is their passion, so you can bet your butt you’ll ruffle more than a few phoenix down feathers if you try to pull anything shady.
