[monkeydreams]

Game design is a form of expression which requires substantial investment both from the developer and also from the participant. The customers have serious skin in this interaction in the form of money spent on the game, time invested in progression, social standing (sometimes you have to be playing this game because all your friends are playing it) and so on. This leads people to thinking that the moral high ground lies with them - they paid for this, they spent precious time, etc, etc - and the game developers should listen to them (and them alone).

In a way the relationship is like the archetypal "number one fan" for a musician, writer, artist in times past, who had seen all the shows and purchased all the books and now feels, because the object of their attentions has made a choice they disagree with, somehow they have been betrayed. What game development has done is lower the cost of entry into these toxic relationships.