Back at the beginning of the year, I saw a great thread on Twitter from a game dev who illustrated why listening to vocal minorities can sometimes spell doom. “We shipped Planetary Annihilation on Win, Mac, and Linux,” he said. “Linux uses were a big vocal part of the Kickstarter and forums. In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related). Would totally skip Linux.”
This is a perfect example of how a vocal minority of players can end up costing a company time and resources (which = $$$) which may have prevented them from working on content or resources that would have impacted a larger percentage of the playerbase. https://t.co/ohTborP0dt
— Marcus (@MoeFwacky) January 3, 2019
As an MMO player, I couldn’t help but think about MMOs that have strayed from their path because they listened a bit too much to vocal minorities either within the dev team or within the playerbase – even the alpha playerbase, or so the story goes for games like WildStar, which to most folks watching veered wildly off course from its original announced design into a hardcore raiding format that most MMO gamers did not want to play. I suspect you can see the effect in certain crowdfunded MMOs too.
How much power should “vocal minorities” have over MMO development, and when have you seen it go way, way wrong?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
