Jeff Kaplan, former Vice President of Blizzard, has been in the news lately. Mostly due to his comments related to his former employer, but he’s also working on a pretty neat Western Rust-like game, "The Legend of California".
During a recent ten-hour developer stream for the game, Jeff began discussing ways players could run their own servers, but at the end of the day, you can’t please everyone.
Article continues below“I don’t wanna play that game. ‘Yeah, then don’t play it, that’s cool.’ You do you. I hope you wanna play Hearthstone, I hope you wanna play Rust, I hope you wanna play 7 Days to Die, just play the game that makes you happy. The like weird, I gotta nerd rage out because that’s what the internet has trained me to do.”
Shut the fuck up, no one cares.
Jeff Kaplan
He then started talking about players who gave feedback, but highlighted players giving actual feedback compared to hatemongers, “I never understand being hostile or being rude about it, but I understand being upset and voicing your opinion. But if a game comes out and you don’t want to play it and you’ve never played it, shut the fuck up, no one cares. We don’t need to hear that you weren’t into it.”
“What is with this, ‘Oh my God, I’m so upset they decided to make this game that I have no interest in!’ Anyway, I’m probably going to get in trouble for everything I said, but I’m at that point in my career where I just don’t care anymore.”
Why Jeff is right — People live to hate
Writing that heading alone is probably enough to get me in trouble, but the conversation deserves a bit more nuance than a simple endorsement.
At its core, Kaplan’s point is hard to argue with. What started as a movement to hold developers accountable and push for better games has long since mutated into something far less constructive. Now, it’s just a relentless griefing, “this isn’t what I wanted,” drowning out any meaningful discussion.
Games like Concord and Veilguard, titles that had a promising premise but ended up falling short due to weird design choices or gameplay loops. Those are the sorts of games where describing what’s wrong with it is entirely warranted, but letting that dictate your entire personality is something else we need to stop.
Look at Highguard, a game that was plagued by issues, but before it even launched, the internet had decided how terrible it was, and they literally couldn’t wait to be right. The game’s failure was celebrated before it even happened. Think about that. Does that sound normal to you?
I wrote a piece on how these live-service games live and die by their playerbase, and that backing their development with player feedback from Alphas and Betas is crucial to their success. Which is where Marathon comes in. A game that even I pegged as doomed based on its initial offerings last summer decided to do exactly what it needed to do, and that was to listen to player feedback.
They didn’t listen to the needless white noise, but the voices that carried actual weight. Actual feedback that the development team could take into their studio and mold into something better. Now, Marathon is terrific, and something I’ll add my voice to here with a proper review soon enough once Cryo Archive drops.
However, there’s still a massive amount of hate for the game coming from people who never played it and never intended to. People whose entire personalities are overcome by this incessant need to be loud and furious about something.
Seriously, it’s like some people live to spit on the work of other people if it so happens to mismatch a color scheme with their waifu’s horoscope.
Against all odds, Marathon is still managing to peak at around 60,000 concurrent users on Steam (the metrics on Xbox and PlayStation aren’t as widely known). Streamers like TheBurntPeanut, TimTheTatMan, and Hutch all laid out how aggravating it was to try to play Marathon due to the unwarranted hate thrown at it.
Clearly, the tides are turning against unwarranted hate if some of the top streamers are calling out their own fanbase. That, or maybe they’ll be the next ones cancelled. Who knows.
Is Jeff right when it comes to some of the discourse we see in gaming?
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
