RE: Gamers Aren't Very Nice People

Kinja'd!!! "Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert" (joshuagilbert)
09/04/2014 at 14:06 • Filed to: None

Kinja'd!!!0 Kinja'd!!! 0

A couple weeks ago, Luke Plunkett !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! Puppygames' rant concerning the Dark Side of PR in indie media development. Earlier this week, editor Cas wrote a follow up concerning his inflammatory rant. Enjoy!

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Well, that went pretty much as expected, didn't it?

I'm now peeping back out of my bunker and it feels safe enough to remove my flame-resistant underpants. This time around, I'll give the polite version sans rhetoric and sardonic speech forms that confused so many people. Bless the Internet, but it seems that so many readers turned up to the blog post actually wanting to have a fight and somehow read the post as if it had been specifically written about them, for them . I'm afraid this is not how sardonic rhetoric speech works, and none of us are so important as to seriously believe somebody would write a random blog post on a two-bit backwater indie game developer's site that was actually addressed directly to us, now, would they? Exactly. Now everyone's calmed down I bit I'll explain the post.

FIRST OF ALL, I BE PLAYIN' YA

My apologies for that.

I deliberately wrote the most invective, filthy, shit-stirring post I could to ensure that it would, indeed, make lots of people angry. Angry enough to repeat and respond to it all over the internet. Unfortunately in this day and age, well-reasoned and sensible posts such as those made by the wonderful !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! of Spiderweb Software are received in hushed tones, nodded sagely to, discussed in high-brow intellectual circles and then disappear like ships in the night. Everyone goes back about their business and the next day everything is the same as before. Spiderweb is probably better-known than we are having been around for many more moons and made many more games, and still, people really aren't taking a lot of notice about what's going on.

So my little missive was designed to ensure that it spread far and wide, hopefully virally. Which it pretty much did, thanks to the power of Twitter. The site was flattened for a few hours. The plan was that Angry Internet Man would misunderstand the post, start a fire somewhere on the internet, and then someone with a few more braincells and the patience to actually read the whole article would respond and pour some sense on the discussion. Which by and large is exactly what happened. In this regard it's been absolutely successful, bringing it to the attention of a far, far greater audience than we'd have reached if we'd just been nice and polite about everything.

And once again being absolutely honest: I didn't do the post absolutely for altruistic reasons. It's been said that it was a desperate bid for attention disguised as truth; in fact, it's truth disguised as a desperate bid for attention. I knew beforehand about the total roasting that the internet was going to dole out to me after posting it. That's exactly why no other developer wants to say what I had to say. So I've tried to mitigate the damage it was going to cause by at least getting Puppygames into the consciousness of as many people as possible.

Comments closed on this post. Anyone still somehow insulted by the previous blog post is simply not capable of reason and there is really no point in you venting flames about something you don't understand; those who understand and/or support us, you have been well appreciated over the last week and we send hugs and kisses in your general direction.

I WISH I HADN'T INVOKED PHIL FISH

It seems that Phil Fish is some sort of bogeyman in gamer circles and the mere mention of Phil Fish causes all sorts of random and spurious bullshit to erupt. Unfortunately this seems to have deflected a full third of the conversations about the deeper meaning of the post onto rants for and against Fish. Next time I'll pick someone more low-profile to use as a poster child, like Zoe Quinn or something.

IT WASN'T ABOUT PUPPYGAMES

An awful lot of people wrongly thought the post was a desperate rant on behalf of a failing developer whose business is going down the tubes. I'm afraid you'll have to reformulate your entire line of thinking and conclusions for two fairly solid reasons. Firstly, we're not going down the tubes; we're doing OK and we've got two games in development and all sorts of irons in the fire. Even if we did run out of money we'd still be making games because that's what we like doing and we did it for 7 years before we made anything beyond a few beers.

Secondly, the post was simply not about Puppygames. It was about the entire indie game industry. Actually it probably applies to the AAA industry as well, or at least all the mid-sized studios kicking about that make AAA quality games but without the marketing budget that defines the AAA industry. All developers are in the same boat. All developers are having to deal with this problem – the problem of having worthless customers . I'm not even sure why there's a pretence that we even have customers any more: they – you – all belong to Valve. We are unable to issue a refund for our games. We have no way to directly contact a customer after they've bought a game from us. But that's ok, because you can get games for a dollar now, eh>?

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR GAMES

The next most prevalent response was to incorrectly assume, as a conclusion based on the incorrect assumption that we were going out of business, that there's some problem with our "shitty" games. Again, I'm sorry to pop your bubble but you're going to have to draw some other conclusions. Our games have grossed over $1.5m in the last four years or so and continue to sell (although not as well as we'd hope they'd sell but then again – we are a niche interest and we've had very little exposure from Valve relatively).

WE DO LOVE OUR CUSTOMERS

…and it even says so explicitly in the previous post, but it seems a lot of people either didn't actually bother reading it at all, or just made up what they wanted it to say and then got angry about that! No, we do in fact love our customers, even if they're only worth 10p. What we don't love is customers who demand that we fix their computers, threaten us with lawyers, chargebacks, violence (yes, really), and general hate, sometimes before they've even asked us for help getting their games working – and worse, sometimes even after we've gotten their games working.

That sort of crap is not good. Check out this sort of thing we get:

You fucking piece of shit, yeah you Cas make sure you read this, this is so funny for you to moderate something you don't like right ?

It's about your complaint "you re worthless", you re just the same asshole just like Phil Fish, always bitching and insulting people who like your games, no have no motherfucking respect, you insult people because they are not happy with the game or because the game isn't working ? They gave you their money and you re acting like a little bitch ? You know I hope for you I will never see you in real life at a convention because I swear I m gonna fuck you Cas you little bitch you and your stupid blog posts, it's so easy to rant behind a screen, we will see if you re so tough, just like the fucking Fish.

Those dollars i spent on your shitty game will shure come in handy when you get cancer(hopefully)and have to pay your medical bills. O wait, i pirated that shit and i hope you'll end up broke in a ditch.

and this:

You fucking piece of shit, yeah you Cas make sure you read this, this is so funny for you to moderate something you don't like right ?

It's about your complaint "you re worthless", you re just the same asshole just like Phil Fish, always bitching and insulting people who like your games, no have no motherfucking respect, you insult people because they are not happy with the game or because the game isn't working ? They gave you their money and you re acting like a little bitch ? You know I hope for you I will never see you in real life at a convention because I swear I m gonna fuck you Cas you little bitch you and your stupid blog posts, it's so easy to rant behind a screen, we will see if you re so tough, just like the fucking Fish.

Those dollars i spent on your shitty game will shure come in handy when you get cancer(hopefully)and have to pay your medical bills. O wait, i pirated that shit and i hope you'll end up broke in a ditch.

And this stuff is minor compared to what a lot of developers receive. And none of us are exempt; it's almost as if this sort of thing is "par for the course" once you get to a certain level of exposure. Just like "being a woman in a man's world" meant at one time you had to just "suck it down" when you were groped, slobbered on, leered over, or just plain talked down to. It's exactly the same issue with a different target: it's about a total lack of respect for a relatively defenceless minority. There are hundreds of thousands of customers to every one developer. The odds are not on our side, and as we've noticed, the group IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to its size, and it sure does help when the target of such behaviour has very little support or sympathy.

IN CONCLUSION

Next time you feel like getting enraged at something, have a read through it again to make sure you've not misunderstood something, or missed something rather important in the post that changes its entire meaning. Especially if you're getting enraged.

Now, I wonder what we're going to do about the actual situation? That'll be the subject of some other blog posts.


DISCUSSION (0)