[arkades]

I don’t understand what forces devs to participate directly in this public discourse. Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference, why precisely are you publicly interacting with your customers?

Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.

[vvanders]

Did you read the article? He laid it out pretty clearly:

> All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that include every feature under the sun.

Lots of book authors and other artists who have to "promote" themselves on social media run into similar issues.

[arkades]

Did you read my comment?

“Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,”

Let’s both appreciate the moment.

[dang]

Can you please not engage in flamewars on Hacker News? You've arguably crossed the line in this thread, and it's quite unnecessary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[vvanders]

You're assuming that game developers want to live in some sort of isolated ivory tower.

Everyone I knew who got into the industry did it to share the joy that gaming brought them to other people. It's an explicitly social industry in that respect.

Also, I don't know of a single place that can afford to run interference for every single dev. Even on the large AAA stuff I worked on we were lucky to have 1 or 2 marketing people who were even aware the dev team existed.

[arkades]

I’m assuming no such thing. I’m saying this is a “have your cake and eat it too” issue. Either you’re accessible to millions or you arent, and that choice comes with benefits and drawbacks. If one can’t handle the drawbacks of being publicly accessible to millions, one should go to great pains to prevent that, rather than lamenting the inevitable - and I do mean inevitable - long tail of jerks.

And when I say “run interference,” I mean “handle all public interactions for the product, which your devs shouldn’t be involved in at all, because they’re devs, not marketers.”

[yannyu]

While what you're saying may be true, maybe we should be questioning why this kind of communication is considered acceptable and without consequence in the gaming community.

[arkades]

Whether it’s acceptable isn’t the point. If 70% of people do it, it’s acceptable. If .1% of people do it, it’s not - but if you’re taking .1% of a very large number, the result is untenable for those on the receiving end.

This is a problem -without- requiring it to be acceptable behavior.

[mattmanser]

It's ok to be an asshole because it's over the internet? These people wouldn't say what they're saying to others in real life.

It's a serious problem with online interactions, especially in the gaming field where people get unreasonably passionate and there's a lot of sexually frustrated young men needing to vent their anger.

Hell, I've been an asshole here on HN, I know I have been, it's so much easier to be without seeing someone's face.

It doesn't make it ok or acceptable though, and unfortunately I feel I have to downvote and speak against you because what you're doing is defending hate and evil. It shouldn't have to be a cost of business, it's not business, it's an unfortunate side effect of the free and open and anonymous internet. It doesn't mean we should accept it though.

[arkades]

No, it’s not OK to be an ass because it’s on the Internet. Since I didn’t say that, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take a jab at straw men. In fact, I didn’t say a word about the people being jerks - but about the practicalities of being, in effect, a celebrity.

When you’re on a platform serving an arbitrarily large number of people, even a vanishingly small percentage of them amount to more toxicity than a single recipient can handle. That’s the asymmetry of celebrity, and has nothing at all to do with whether the toxic behavior is acceptable or not. It’s a large numbers issue.

Dealing with toxic people is a guaranteed consequence of opening yourself up to communication with millions. Yes, it -is- the cost of celebrity, and always has been. It’s just the weird nature of the internet that the nature of “celebrity” has changed.

[tehwebguy]

Right, you are simply saying, “if they don’t want to be abused they should hide”

[arkades]

I am saying, “if you don’t want the drawbacks of celebrity, don’t engage with masses of people.”

[swivelmaster]

Unless you have unlimited time or financial resources, you can't make a great game without having a dialog with your audience. Game developers' instincts are not infallible and they need to be able to get feedback and suggestions from their audience. Unfortunately, some of that feedback might be 'die in a fire.'

edit: And there's also the matter of games with live service components, where you're in a state of constantly tweaking the game based on feedback, potentially for years.

[Pfhreak]

Games have credits. Developers have Twitter accounts. Devs are excited about their work, share what they are working on. The devs are not seeking these interactions at all.

[arkades]

All of my patients know my name. It’s on a badge, with a picture ID and all. This includes drug seekers, people looking for a suit, a handout, and just a general smattering of crazy folks. Yet they don’t manage to find my fb, my Twitter, my LinkedIn.

Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two.

Unless you -have- to be the public face of a product, your professional media interactions shouldn’t be accessible to the masses. Your private definitely shouldn’t be. They need to be heavily firewalled. If I can trivially message the lead dev of my favorite game, he’s done something wrong. If I can reach him on a private account he can’t just burn or ignore, he’s done a lot wrong.

The internet hosts the majority of people on earth: it’s a very, very long tail of crazy, poorly socialized, immature, etc. There is no changing that if you are accessible to seven billion people, some tiny percent of that will amount to an overwhelming amount of shit.

The answer is jealously guarding your privacy and communications channels, which isn’t something I’ve seen in these discussions.

Im not trying to victim blame here. I just don’t see as fruitful lamenting something that boils down to “dealing with the public en masse sucks.” It does, and it will:

[Pfhreak]

Think about scale. A good indie game might have hundreds of thousands or millions of players. Is that the same order of magnitude of patients you see?

[arkades]

No, of course it isn’t.

But then, I’m pseudonymous or anonymous everywhere, and do my level best to keep my pseudonyms unrelated to one another across multiple platforms.

As opposed to letting my patients trivially connect my real name to my various social media channels.

[vvanders]

> No, of course it isn’t.

Then maybe it's time to put down the keyboard and listen to the experiences of the people who have found some level of success.

When you've shipped a title that's moderately successful you're more then welcome to come back here and tell us how were doing it all wrong. Until then I find it hard to listen to the advice of someone who can't empathize with what is happening here.

[burger_moon]

Comments like this are equivalent to saying you cannot criticize a football players performance because you've never won a championship. It's illogical on many levels.

[tehwebguy]

Do you need to constantly network so you can get a new job as a doctor if your next big release fails and your employer / project folds?

[arkades]

I mean, kind of?

Not to and with patients, but certainly to and with other docs and healthcare executives. The age of “I open a private practice and work there until I die” came to an end about a decade ago. Never mind requiring a constant stream of referrals. I have to network pretty constantly.

[toast0]

It's a big deal that games have credits, because they didn't always. However, as a person who works on popularish internet services, I'm pretty happy my name isn't published as a developer of it -- even just polite people trying to get customer support would be an avalanche of communications anywhere I use my name (although I share a name with a Pulitzer Prize winning author, so it's harder to find me).

[ericmcer]

Promotion is vital to an indie game-dev. If they don't spread information about their game via the usual social media channels it will sit untouched and unknown. It is a super necessary part of modern entrepreneurship.

[m3mnoch]

let me introduce you to mobygames: http://www.mobygames.com/game/xbox-one/disney-infinity-30-ed...

like movies, games have credits. entertainment products (movies, games, music, books, etc.) have traditionally been about following talent around to find more work by them. we're all basically entertainers.

that, and angry gamers can chase down people to yell at. especially the higher you are in the responsibility chain, the easier you are to find. linkedin makes sure of that. resumes and all that. because, you know, game devs want jobs, too.

this often means game developers don't have the choice to not be derided in public. not unless step one to joining a game team is the switch your entire life to "private". delist your home address. everything. and, i know plenty of devs who've had to. we all shrug and say, "man, that sucks."

because the difference between making games and making boring, insurance middleware? nobody really cares about enterprise middleware as craft. nobody wants to do it, much less thinks they can do it better.

EVERYONE passionately thinks/hopes/wishes/wants to make better games than you.

(. . . well, maybe not everyone, but certainly a whole lotta folks)