It's hard to believe this article was thought out at all, but I guess Mr Croshaw is good at being funny and ranting which is great entertainment, but he doesn't really have a precedent for delivering real, analytical views on games. So I suppose I should be forgiving for that.
But really, this article is just one big false dilemma. It seems our beloved Yahtzee is so jaded he sees drooling, single-minded fanboys and raging, misanthropic game critics as the only two sorts of people in the gaming world.
First let's get the hard part out of the way look at things from a business perspective. Now I'm one of those artsy literary assholes, so I HATE "business" in the sense of companies that consider an "intellectual property" as a means to make money, rather than money as a means to pay for food and shelter so you can continue to improve and extend the IP. But from even the "evil" business perspective, the idea of sequels not being made by fans, for fans, is extremely counterproductive.
What are "bad" sequels, really? Name recognition. Anybody that liked the first is practically guaranteed to buy the second regardless of how bad it is, because in the real world how many people actually read reviews? These kinds of people are also usually so desperate for gratification they will be pleased by the smallest things and become zealously loyal to brands they don't even really like. It has to do with games becoming the next status symbol and social flagpole, but that's best left for another post. Suffice it to say a lot of people will buy sequels to games they didn't even like out of a need to follow social norms, and businesses know this. The sequel doesn't need to be good, it only needs to be "good enough." But what's important is it needs to appeal to the people who bought the first, or they won't buy the third. Why should companies change things in sequels? Generic Game 2 will sell regardless, but pissing off the fans makes it less likely they'll buy Generic Game 3. Sure, you get new fans to replace them, but you've ended up spending a lot more time and money and not gaining any significant returns. There's a reason cash cows exist: they work.
Looking at things from an smartsy-artsy sort of view: both options are wrong. No real fan thinks anything they are a fan of is flawless. That's not being a fan, that's being so socially insecure you have a need to define your identity by things you like because you believe that will make you friends with other people who like the same thing. Real fans hate fanboys more than haters, because it's fanboys that give the haters the excuse to hate, and make anybody that even associates with the work in question look bad, meaning real fans get flak from idiots that can't tell the difference. These sort of fans will doubtlessly attempt to define the work more and more to match themselves, not because they think it will improve the work, but because they want to be associated with this thing and be recognized. In short, these sort of people are failures as human beings and should be herded up like cattle and sold into slavery, not making games.
On the other hand, if you allow people who hate the game to make the sequel, the sequel will change too much. It will become exactly like something the hater likes, and instead of being a copy of the first game, it'll just be a copy of some other game. Even if the hater is smart enough to avoid doing this, the chances the sequel will remain consistent and keep its identity is extremely slim. I think Yahtzee is guilty of a pretty big fallacy here. It sounds like if HE doesn't like it, it should change, and since he hates nearly everything, that means change is always better. I wonder just how well he could defend this idea if one were to remind him of Prince of Persia. Or would he say it was the fan's idea to make PoP2 so dark and emo? There's a big difference between "improvement" and "change," and allowing haters to work on sequels would bring far too much of the later, which not everyone would agree is the former. And honestly, if someone hated the first game, I doubt they would buy the second no matter how much it was "improved."
Between these two options, I say letting the fans make sequels is better. This way the sequels maintain their identity, and we know if we didn't like it before we still won't, if we did, we probably still will, and at least the people who actually care will be happy, while the casuals will continue to buy whatever makes them popular in their circles. But this sort of thinking is far too black and white. There ARE real fans that see the flaws in games and love them anyway. People who really WOULD pay respect by not pulling any self-insertion bs and fix the game's flaws while leaving everything good alone. That's how we get games like GTA3 that kept the humor, freedom, action, and key elements of their first two games, and moved past the flawed camera and control scheme that made it such a pain to enjoy everything else. Or Devil May Cry, which first tried to change too much and make the characters something they weren't, as well as introducing another character that played too differently from the former badass we all wanted to see more of, but then realized its mistakes and fixed itself in 3, bringing back the cocky, taunt-loving kid-in-a-man's body we loved, cranked up the difficulty again, and re-simplified the combat so it was once again easy to pull off combos that would make your grandma shit her pants in excitement. Or Half-life 2, that took its cinematic you-are-Freeman style of storytelling and original, gameplay-changing puzzles to the next level while ditching the cramped, narrow corridors in favor of larger set pieces that allowed more choices in battle. I don't think these games were made by haters. I think haters is why we got emo-Dante in the first place. I think haters are why Fallout is no longer an RPG, and Resident Evil is now an action game. Haters are why World of Warcraft no longer has any semblance of difficulty, and why it exists in the first place (RTS haters).
Meanwhile fangirls are why after 2, Star Ocean became about the ugliest anime characters ever created having a contest to see who could come up with the worst plot device or hire the most annoying voice actor, and fanboys are why that ***** Krystal still appears in Starfox games. BOTH sides are wrong, and so is Yahtzee for not recognizing that real, respectable, level-headed fans do exist, and sometimes they even get to make games.
