I think it’s important to recognize where such gamers are coming from. These players aren’t doing these things because they think that they are the most effective means of applying pressure to the publishers, they’re signing petitions, calling for boycotts, and trying to organize because they care very deeply about the game/franchise and feel like they have no other way of making their voices heard. Such things are acts of desperation, not rationality.
I really wish there were better ways to engage with them, because it’s clear that they feel very passionately about the game/franchise, but the reality is that there are often a lot of additional context in our decision-making process that I wish they could understand. But that’s the unfortunate truth of the matter - they don’t have the kind of information we do informing our decisions, they typically have different goals than we do, and there isn’t a way (yet, to my knowledge) to reconcile these kind of differences at scale.
Personally, I try to avoid the temptation to dunk on these gamers even if they might have an overinflated sense of their own importance to the franchise. I prefer to hope that there’s something we can (eventually) offer that is to these players’ tastes while staying within the constraints that are the necessities of the business.
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