[Cafey]

"I want [something] and I want it now."

This is what I hear from reading most of those angry tweets/comments.

Sadly, sometimes they are simply shouting because the game is not what they were hyped about. Maybe we are over-hyping games to get pre-orders in? I remember a time when the first time I heard about a game was when it was actually on the store shelves (good ol' boxes). Now there are dev-blogs and the likes years before a game is actually going to release...

[Impossible]

The thing is marketing a game does not justify death threats, rape threats, doxxing or even personal insults. Poor user reviews, not buying a game, refunds and civil complaints should be enough to signal that a game isn't good enough. If making a game to the best of your ability, marketing it, and not quite hitting the bar for a subset of gamers justifies abuse then I'd recommend developers stop making games. There are better job options that don't subject people to that level of abuse. If you made abusive comments toward startup founders because the MVP doesn't live up to the hype of the landing page on HN you'd get banned or at least heavily downvoted, I don't see why game developers should tolerate that kind of abuse.

[InclinedPlane]

That's victim blaming. Hype is irrelevant. The problem here is not just entitlement, it's that some people feel perfectly ok leveling abuse at other people. This isn't a new phenomenon. There's always been a subset of "I need to speak to the manager" folks who have been willing to treat individuals doing certain jobs in an inhumane and abusive fashion. Today the boundaries on those sorts of interactions are drastically changing, and the levels of abuse that are commonplace have grown much greater. A fast food worker running into an irate customer who avows that they will kill them and rape their family has always been an extraordinarily rare occurrence, today that sort of behavior is commonplace in many contexts and especially in the realm of game development. That doesn't mean everyone is doing it, but the fact that it's tolerated and ubiquitous means that it has a universal impact on those affected.