MOBAs as a genre generally sustain themselves primarily because playing the game at lower skill levels allows players to feel ownership and powerful when they do well, but also provides them excuses from having to admit their own responsibility in their loss. This creates a powerful feedback mechanism where players get to feel significant early validation and offloads having to deal with their own inadequacies until they choose to become serious about the game.

In MOBAs players get to see the results of their own good plays immediately. Whether it's landing a skill shot, hitting with an ultimate, winning a team fight, gathering resources through laning or jungling, pushing a lane, taking down a tower, these are all immediate "wins" for the active player. It's easy to see the causal nature of the forward progress here - the player performs the action and gets to see the positive results of that action almost immediately.

On the other side, players get to blame their teammates when they're losing because their own mistakes are easy to dismiss. It's extremely difficult for a game loss to be attributed to a single mistake; game losses tend to result from accumulations of multiple bad decisions made over the course of the game. Most of the time, the bad decisions are fairly small and easy to miss. These mistakes only become backbreaking as they add up, resulting in gradual overall momentum change for the entire team. They're also often about proving a negative - that the player didn't do something they should have, rather than choosing to do something they shouldn't have.

This becomes a feedback loop for players - they see themselves improving by making better choices early on, but they don't really have to deal with their own mistakes and failings until they get serious about improving. This is why so many MOBA players get stuck in "ELO Hell" - they have hit their personal skill ceilings but haven't realized it yet.

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While this is true, it's a very different situation. Overwatch is an old game, it's been running for eight years now. When Overwatch launched, there wasn't anywhere near the kind of well-established competition that there is today. When Overwatch launched, there was no Apex Legends, Paladins, Deadlock, Quake Champions, or Valorant. Further, Overwatch's launch cast was designed with incredible visual clarity - nearly every character had a silhouette and visual design that both made them distinct and conveyed their style of gameplay. There's a pair of business terms for this kind of thing - Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean.

A Blue Ocean is mostly unexplored and pristine - you're entering a market that's mostly untouched and there isn't much competition. This favors the first-mover advantage - the first ones there have more time to experiment, set things up, and learn from their mistakes. The customers/players in that market don't have anywhere else to go if they want their gameplay, so you can afford to make mistakes, iterate, and improve. Since there aren't many other games to switch to, the players will likely stick with what they are already familiar with.

A Red Ocean is a saturated market, where the waters have been dyed red with the blood of all of the dead or dying competition. There's already a lot of competition, meaning that any new product must stand out significantly from its peers or it will soon die from lack of audience. In a Red Ocean, the initial launch is much more important because you never get a second chance at that first impression. Further, audience retention is also super important because of how much competition there is - a new product might be able to draw some attention just from the novelty, but novelty wears off quick and most of the players already know the genre and the other games available. If the new game doesn't serve their needs immediately, the players won't give it the time to improve - they'll just go to one of the competitors that already does serve their needs.

We can't really compare the two games in a vacuum, we must compare the full environment that the games launched in. Overwatch had the added benefit of significantly less competition in its Blue Ocean, meaning that the playerbase really didn't have anywhere else to go while they waited for Overwatch to improve things. Concord was unable to grab attention immediately in a Red Ocean, meaning any potential audience quickly dispersed themselves among the large number of competitors already out there.

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Even in walking simulators, there's still the active element of moving around the environment and examining each item. The player retains agency in exploration games, even though there aren't too many other overt actions to take.

Consider a "walking simulator" like The Talos Principle. The actions that the player take include exploring environments, collecting puzzle pieces, avoiding obstacles, jamming obstacles, moving boxes, climbing boxes, using boxes to obstruct enemies, and that neat time recording feature. The Talos Principle primarily interweaves the exploration and narrative elements with puzzle solving.

Another "walking simulator" is The Stanley Parable. In it, there's really only exploring and interacting with the environment, but the presence of the narrator enables two major actions the player can take - obey or disobey the narrator and see the results. It is these decisions and actions that provide the engaging gameplay - the players get pulled in by seeing the results of their choices.

The important thing about the actions that the player chooses to undertake is that every action a player does must cause the game to react to that player's specific actions. Moving from point A to point B shows the player more of the world. Choosing to interact with a door means the door opens, revealing what was behind it. Allowing the player to jump should allow the player to reach places that would otherwise be unreachable without the jumping. The actions a player can take must be acknowledged and recognized by the game. This creates a sense of agency and ownership that places the player in the game world. The player experience changes from "Kratos pulled the head off of Helios" to "I pulled the head off of Helios". These active choices cause a sense of self-insertion that would otherwise not exist if everything just happened while the player passively watched the scene unfold.

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It's mentally discouraging if you can't see a path to get to your goal from where you currently are. Much of human growth as we grow and mature is learning how to "operationalize" - how to break down large seemingly-impossible tasks into smaller, doable tasks. For a small child that might be learning that "clean your room" actually means "put your toys in the toy chest, put your shirts in this drawer, put your pants in this drawer, and make your bed". Before understanding that breakdown, "clean your room" might be an impossible task for the child.

Similarly with games, it can be incredibly daunting to see a huge gap in game skill and/or performance because you haven't yet learned how to operationalize the tasks needed to perform at that level yet. Depending on how much grit (the "not giving up" quality) the player has, that can either be the end of it or it can be the point of catharsis for the player to figure out how to get to where she wants to be. As we learn these skills and figure out how they fit and work together, the overall goal should become more and more practically achievable. As designers, we generally try to avoid creating experiences where skill gaps are shown so visibly for just that reason - we don't want players to give up before things get fun - but there's also that tradeoff of players wanting to see just how cool and awesome a thing can be at its highest potential.

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Henry Louis Mencken famously said "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." The mindset you mention sets up a false dichotomy - that quality/love is the antithesis of money/hate, and that's incredibly short-sighted. the truth of the matter is that games of a certain quality bar must be profitable enough not only to recoup the investment spent to develop and market them, but more on top of that in order to cover the losses from games that we build that are not hits. This is the bare minimum needed for a game company to survive and that number is a lot bigger than most laymen think.

Quality is not free. We pay for it by hiring and paying more devs to do the work and/or by increasing the workload of the dev team through crunch and physical + mental burnout. Quality is also not a set formula - no one sets out to make a bad game on purpose. Building games is incredibly complicated and difficult. Building a good game is absolutely not the same thing as building a financially successful game, and both of these are extremely difficult endeavors. Given the hypothetical mutually-exclusive choice between making a good game and making a financially successful game, I would always choose the financially successful game because it means I then get to continue making games that have the chance to be both good and financially successful, rather than just one or the other.

We on the development side are not entitled to players buying or playing our games. We can only offer a value proposition - we hope enough players will find more value in playing our games as they are than the money spent on them. If enough players are willing to give us their money, we can continue to make games. We want to build things players will like, but we need to build things players are willing to spend for. These two things are not (fully) incongruous. What matters is whether we can find enough players who are willing to stay in that overlap between liking and willing to spend.

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It likely wouldn't do anything. First and foremost the timing doesn't line up. The developers were laid off in August, and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf won't launch at earliest until April of 2024. Boycotts won't work until the game is actually launched which would be a full nine months at earliest after those people lost their jobs. The need for severance pay is usually immediate because that money is what we live on while we look for a new job. Promising a starving person that you'll help them get some food nine months down the line is not particularly helpful.

Second, boycotts rarely work. The majority of Dragon Age players couldn't name a single developer who worked on the game, let alone have the kind of deep-cut awareness of the business dealings at Bioware. It's helpful to remember the [80-20-5 rule] - things that the really hard core fans know about are utterly foreign to the majority of a game's community, especially AAA games with literal millions of players.

Even if gamers somehow managed to get the message out to the community, the community rallying together to affect the game's sales numbers, the publisher getting the right takeaway from the boycott, and the publisher deciding to give those developers their due severance pay all those months after DAD launches, we still probably wouldn't ever find out because it would almost certainly end (at best) in a settlement with all parties signing NDAs as a requirement for the settlement to go through. In that situation, we'd get no news at all about the matter. Ever.

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There are several approaches and techniques I can think of that will help mitigate the sting of losing.

Losing players should still get rewarded. Battle Royale games have only one ultimate winner, but they hand out rewards to all participants. Those who survive longer get better rewards, even if they don't win. Many games have achievements and secondary goals that grant rewards even if you don't win the match.

Losing will always sting, but we don't have to let it fester. We can, instead, offer the loser a quick exit and an option to get into a new game quickly. Most battle royale games offer the ability to spectate or start queueing for a new game immediately upon game loss.

Losing can be an opportunity to learn and improve. Not a lot of games do this, but I really like how fighting games have replays of your matches where you can go back and see the inputs and the events that transpired. Several of them even have instantaneous takeover, where the player can let the replay go until they start inputting new commands and see what would have happened if they had done something different.

Losing feels less bad if there are things built into the game that can share/take the blame. Think about how many players in MOBA games like League and DotA complain about their teammates, rather than look inward for reasons they lose. Similarly, randomized elements like not drawing enough (or too many) lands in Magic: the Gathering can give players a convenient "release valve" for their frustration and let them continue playing without needing to harm their own egos.

I think that it's important to recognize that the importance of victory is mostly determined by the stakes involved in the game. If we reward players primarily for victory, then winning will feel better and losing will feel worse. If you don't grant heavy rewards for victory, then the losing doesn't feel worse and the winning won't feel as good. Still, through judicious reward placement and some vents for frustration, we can make mitigate the worst of the sting of losing for most players.

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I'm sure that they had plenty of good reasons for the overall changes in the patch. I think that the D4 team leadership misjudged the audience reception to the patch, which is why they apologized for the way it was delivered. It is unfortunate, but game devs are fallibly human too and we do make mistakes from time to time.

It is likely to me that they justified making these changes for the long term health of the game and to bring things back to expected values in accordance with future content releases - there's a plan in place that those of us on the outside are not privy to for not just Season 1, but also Season 2 and beyond. Season 1 has already launched, Season 2 is likely undergoing its final touches before being locked down, and Season 3 is likely already in production as we speak. They know where they want the game to go, so it is likely they want to bring power levels in line now before things spiral out of control later on. This doesn't mean that they gave enough thought about how well the changes would be received, only that there is likely a reasonable basis for their decisions.

As for how sincerely fans should take their apology, I would say it doesn't really matter. Fans should not look at this as anything more than a consumer relationship - they get a product whose value they can determine for themselves. If they continue to get sufficient value from the product for the time and effort they put into it, then they'll continue to engage with it. If the value proposition goes negative, they'll drop it. This is how things should be. I think that getting too emotionally invested in the drama around the metagame is unhealthy. I think that fans should play the game if they like it and put it down if they don't. Getting too much into whether one should accept an apology from the dev team is too much emotional investment in my opinion.

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It's probably the same reason that dissatisfied fans of other major franchises have difficulty transitioning to other similar games - the things they dislike about one game, while important to them, aren't as important overall as all of the other things they do like. It is more comfortable for most players to play Pokemon (or Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, or whatever major franchise) and complain than it is to actually step out of their comfort zone and play a competing game - especially if that competing indie game doesn't have the breadth of features or production value of Pokemon.

Industry leading games like Pokemon aren't small undertakings. There's a huge amount of work that goes into each and every pokemon game. Without similar budgetary backing and experience in the field, a competitor can't realistically build out similarly competitive feature sets. It goes further than this, though - Pokemon isn't a stationary target. Every new mainline game release brings new features, new gameplay, new story, new regions, and also brings back plenty of nostalgic content as well. Furthermore, new Pokemon games get built with all of the technology, tools, and expertise of the predecessors - they have a lot of collective experience building Pokemon games that a new competitor would likely lack. All of these factors put together means that any competitor aiming to take down the leader is not aiming at a stationary target, but a moving target - one that has a lead and is continuing to push forward. This is what makes industry leading franchises so difficult for a "killer" competitor to dethrone - it requires a tremendous amount of effort and resources to catch up to, let alone surpass, a market leader.

There's also the mentality aspect of things - human brains tend to dislike change quite a bit. The percentage of players who threaten to quit a particular game and actually follow through is significantly smaller than the percentage of players who quit playing for other reasons. Much of the time, even if the player does switch to a new game, the overall scale of the changes to adapt to and inability for competitors to produce the consistency, production value, and scope of content that the franchise leader can usually results in the player returning to the original franchise at the next major product launch. These players often enter a leave/return cycle, where they'll play for a while, leave, and then return at the next major launch.

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The "made for kids" label is a very real thing, but most laymen misunderstand its purpose and often treat it as a pejorative. When used in an argument, is yet another equivalent of saying "I don't like this" while trying to make their opinions feel or sound more valid. Making products like games for children is actually quite specific, because children are not small adults, they are completely different beasts from a cognitive and self-awareness perspective.

Young children (e.g. ages 1 to 13) actually go through tremendous changes year over year in terms of cognitive development because they are growing and learning so quickly. A baby, for example, does not have the concept of object persistence yet - if an object leaves their sight, it ceases to exist for them. This is why peek-a-boo is so delightful for them - when you cover your face to play peek-a-boo, you stop existing to the child. Children can't really understand that other people exist and have their own separate thoughts and feelings before age six. The attention span of a four-year-old is much much shorter than a six-year-old.

This means that products aimed at children have a very specific targeted age window because of how differently each age group generally sees the world. The cognitive difference between a four-year-old and an eight-year-old is enormous, meaning that a game targeting four-year-olds are necessarily enormously different than games targeting eight-year-olds. This is what the "for kids" label generally means - these products are targeted at people with different levels of cognitive function.

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Strong emotional response is a key factor in player engagement in most cases (sadness/despair is the notable outlier here). A strong anger reaction has a lot of potential for an engaging player experience, as long as we create the experience carefully. We do this by creating a specific target for that anger that isn't the game itself, and by giving the player a satisfying way to release all of the tension that anger has built up within them.

Let me illustrate this concept in two gifs. First, we create a very specific target for players to focus all of that anger on.

We want the player to feel that anger, just not at the game. We want to present a character or challenge that the player can get angry at. We want it to be frustrating, but not break the flow band into anxiety. This will build tension very quickly and pull the player in - an angry player will be many things, but won't be bored.

Once we've built up enough tension, we then create an encounter for the player to release all of that built-up tension in a satisfying way.

That release of all that tension is then replaced within the player by catharsis, which feels great. Catharsis is that sense of satisfaction and relaxation you get after releasing all of your pent-up rage in a good way, without any of the regret or hurt that releasing anger normally causes. The more tension we built before releasing, the better the release feels.

If the game doesn't provide an adequate release for that tension, the player has nowhere else to vent except at the game itself. This often transforms the tension into disappointment. This is why both steps are equally important. We need to build the anger up at a target, and then we need to lead the player to the best place to release all that anger on the target, achieving catharsis. That results in a memorable and engaging experience.

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It feels like it because that's exactly what happens. Most AAA games experience large influx of initial number of players that drops significantly after a few weeks. That is the usual cycle. Most AAA games have their marketing campaigns climax at the game's launch, which means a lot of players will give the game a try. It's actually very rare for more than half of players who pick a game to actually finish it. The > 50% of players who drop the game do so for a variety of reasons - they they get busy, they don't really like the game, they start another game they were interested in, they go back to an old favorite game, they go join their friends in another game, and so on and so forth. This is normal and not unexpected.

As for why people are obsessed with it, I believe it is because humans are emotional creatures and put a lot of that emotional investment into things they like (such as games). If a person likes something, they usually want it to do well and feel some amount of happiness if the thing they like does well. If a person dislikes something, they usually wish it ill and feel some amount of happiness if the thing they dislike is failing. If a person gets very emotionally invested in a game that ends up disappointing them for some reason, it's very much like a jilted lover situation - all that positive emotion turns bitter and they become super invested in seeing the object of their bitterness fail.

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Why Devs don’t respond directly to good player feedback in a timely manner, even though we ask for it

It should be well-established that players providing reasonable, well-written feedback about what they (dis)like about a game and why is the best and most actionable way to see real change enacted in the game dev process. I’ve had many productive development conversations with coworkers that came about (and several actually initiated real change behind the scenes) because of useful community feedback. I can’t remember a single instance in my entire career where I’ve ever participated in a serious development conversation brought on because of petitions, boycotts, or review bombs. 

Unfortunately, the big problem with the way things work is that, from the outside looking in, the engaged community players get the exact same results from both approaches - radio silence. This happens in no small part because we work on a different time scale than most player expectation. Unless the problem is some kind of literal service-interrupting game-crashing issue, chances are good the players won’t see the results of our work for another three to six months at earliest. For most live service games, we’re often working one or two patches in the future - if the live game is on content patch A, we’re usually testing, fixing bugs and locking up in content patch B for cert/submission while developing new stuff in content patch C. If we receive community feedback and make changes based on that feedback, it will almost certainly go into the patch that’s still in development - patch C. Because most patch deliveries happen every three months, this means that it is often anywhere from three to six months before the community gets to see the results of their feedback in game. The topic du jour of conversation will likely have moved on by that point.

This assumes that the feedback is for changes that we can make fairly easily, like game balance and adjusting data values. For more resource-intensive requests like asking for better representation for LGBTQIA+ or people of color in the game, I would assume that the community asking for this would want it done right rather than quickly. In order to gather those resources, create the content and validate it, and push it live properly and respectfully, it would take a significant amount of time - especially if we can’t do it all in-house (e.g. if it requires licensor sign-off, voice acting, new animations, etc.). Content created as a result of resource-intensive feedback is likely not to see the light of day for a year at the earliest even if we really want to do it, and even then likely not until the next game (or major expansion) which may be multiple years in the future.

This unfortunately all looks exactly to the community an awful lot like radio silence. We can’t read the community in on what’s going on behind closed doors - things get cut, designs change for a variety of reasons, goals and targets change. When the players are faced with mostly radio silence no matter what they do, joining a collective action with other players like signing a petition, adding to a review bomb, or declaring participation in a boycott can certainly feel a lot more validating and appealing than writing reasonable feedback into what feels like the void. This is really unfortunate because I can promise you that the reasonable feedback is far, far more useful to us as developers and also far, far more likely to result in actual change than any boycott, review bomb, or petition ever will. I’m not sure there’s a good solution to this problem. If you can think of one (that doesn’t involve us spending significant dev time reading forums instead of developing the game), I’m all ears.

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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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I’m pretty sure most puzzle games like Tetris aren’t really power fantasies. I also don’t really see many power fantasies in the survival horror genre; those games tend to be about disempowerment more than anything else. I’d argue that games tend more to be escapist fantasy than power fantasy. We tend to look for experiences that we can get away from our more humdrum ordinary lives. Power fantasies are certainly a subset of that (especially because it is pretty fun to feel powerful), but I think escapism is what we’re mostly looking for in games and I think that’s just fine.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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