Frybird said:
If i were a Dev or a Pub, i wouldn't give two shits about about "Fans" outside of Testers and Professional Critics except MAYBE when it comes to creating a sequel for my game. A big maybe, because i'm pretty sure most of the time numbers speak clearer than the incoherent noise of every gaming forum.
The Internet is a god awful place, especially when it comes to gamers voicing their opinion.
If I were a Dev or a Pub, I'd be giving quite a lot of shits about fans, if I wanted to stay in the business. Your average hard-core fan is basically a walking wallet and a free advertising board combined. Just look at EA's stock price nose dive after DAII/SW:ToR/ME3 fiasco. The games, whatever you personally might think of them, are not the main cause of the negativity. I'd say the largest portion of fan rage comes from the devs either going into ignore-mode or flinging insults at the customers. Sure, some of the said customers were outright assholes, but most (like me) were upset when they discovered that the product was not what was promised.
I'm not saying that devs should cater to every whim of the "unwashed masses", but nor should they lump the most extreme haters together with those who are mostly concerned with their favourite company going where they cannot follow.
For every well-informed, well-spoken, maybe perhaps even constructive (!) criticism there are dozens of so-called opinions mainly comprised of bitching and moaning. For mostly everything but the most well beloved Franchises.
It must be awful for the game industry to hear endless over exaggerated complaints about how all of them are doing their job wrong in the most nastiest and often baseless and interestingly often hypocritical ways.
Maybe we're not frequenting the same forums (or playing the same games for that matter), but I generally find that the situation is the other way around. When a game receives a particularly harsh backlash, most comments contain more levelheaded explanations for the dissatisfaction that mouthfoaming hate. The "omfg.. the devs are blind and deaf to our plight as faithful fans.. how dare they.." kind of hate.
There, i said it. It may be overgeneralized and defending to things and business-practices i do not like myself, but i am sick and tired of Gamers complaining on the Internet.
I'm sorry, but fuck that. If anything, I welcome the bitching masses. Unless you have an attention span of a kitten on speed, it's not that difficult to separate fair critisism from incoherent blubbering if you need an outside oponion on something. For example, it didn't take too long to see that OP was extremely biased in his view. There are quite a lot of devs and journalists besides Eric Kane that didn't behave the way those in his examples did. But he didn't mention them. From BioWare, Allan Schumacher and Patrick Weekes come to mind.
Basically, yes, there are so-called fans that are just outright stupid in what they can ***** about, but if a game is really that bad, they are just the unfortunate tip of the iceberg of people who voice their concern with reason. I have yet to see a decent title destroyed by idiot haters; if a good game tanks, it's usually due to poor advetisement. What I haven't seen in quite some time is a studio that won't lump the said idiots with the concerned part of the fan base, not turn up the artistic integrity card and then act surprised and hurt when their customer base gets up and leaves.