There are lots of different gaming communities of varying qualities (and toxicity levels). You paint with a broad brush, but this is understandable when the most visible aspects of online gamer culture are on the big, barely-moderated social media free-for-all platforms. The forum age was better, forums being run by people who cared about quality of discourse on their platforms. And they still exist, here and there.

ETA: Twitter and Reddit and Youtube are the social media platforms I mean. People also let their blog comments turn into free-for-alls. But doesn't a subreddit Reddit count a forum? Kinda. It's not really _run_ by its admins, like a proper independent forum.

Yes I'll concede I was generalizing, my comment is directed at the "popular internet" if that makes sense. I have spent a huge portion of my life active in gaming and gaming communities though, so I've seen the full spectrum of possibilities. I'm still active in a few communities with more mature discourse.

To stand by my statement, I've never seen a sewing subreddit send death threats and hate mail to employees just trying to keep a job, or stalk a CEOs wife out of the public eye, just because a video game has some bugs. It's not just one or two edge cases either, it's a bandwagon of hatred on the popular internet. You're right that it's platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Imgur et al, that enable it, but I don't think that diminishes the issue. There's enough of the "noisy minority" to be harmful.

> the most visible aspects of online gamer culture are on the big, barely-moderated social media free-for-all platforms

The most visible aspects of online gamer culture is whatever some gaming "journalist" dug up on the internet and wrote an article about.

> Gamers are the most toxic community I have ever encountered. Nothing but parroted vitriol and entitlement. I don't even look online anymore, I just play the games and make my own opinions.

Sadly, this is kind of the one part that I blame CDprojectRed for even though I think they delivered an awesome product, albeit super buggy and limited one; they built the hype up so much and pushed the narrative of an immersive in depth World on e day 1 with tons of layers in the storyline and took years to develop. Had they just been honest to pre-buyers and say,'listen, please understand we wanted all these features on launch, but they're just not on day 1, so this will be released as a beta with limited features and bug fixes to come. If anyone wants a full refund we will accommodate it.' Which they eventually were forced to do for physical copies, and then gave Sony a black eye by forcing them to issue refunds from the PS+ store etc..

The Watchdogs team did that, and they also delayed their launch date to October despite it being Q1 2020 with almost no backlash because they were open about it and the price of the digital version then physical copies reflected that set of circumstances, the media didn't even bother commenting on it either despite Online play not being available to this day.

Also, this shows just how sad most gamers lives really are, between paying twitch players and spending every waking hour either playing or commenting on video games on social media one can easily see they don't have much or any real social life.

It's actually really sad, and makes me think about that part of the anime 'Welcome to the NHK' about NEETism and the prevalence of dropping out of Society and creating your own virtual existence Online to fill the void.

It's sad because I was also a gamer up until Sophomore year of university when I just got way too busy going FT and Summer classes and running a business, preparing/repairing my car and going to and training for real motorsports events/weekends and being in even casual relationships--there was simply no time to put in the 5+ hours on Gran Tursimo to refine my lines at Fuji, Suzuka, Laguna Seca or the Nordschleife like I could when I was in HS.

Sadly, for me Nismo's GT academy would later prove it to be a proper outlet and use of my time had I continued as they picked drivers for their lineup in GT racing series from the challenges Online, but by then the eventual financial crash of 2008 crisis was already setting things into motion (early 2007ish) so I couldn't be bothered and I needed to graduate ASAP.

Based on the articles that came out, it would appear that it was a classic case of devs being betrayed by managment and/or the marketing department. One anecdote that struck me was that when the studio announced the April 2019 release, a number of devs thought it was a prank at first because of how implausible it sounded.

> Based on the articles that came out, it would appear that it was a classic case of devs being betrayed by managment and/or the marketing department. One anecdote that struck me was that when the studio announced the April 2019 release, a number of devs thought it was a prank at first because of how implausible it sounded.

It's certainly possible to be the case, and I'm not even ruling out the hack being an inside job given what a clusterf--- this has been so far on a PR level. People gave nearly a decade to this Indie project only to see the same Corpo narrative play out with the dev's being the 'gonks' thrown under the bus when it came to it.

How come management and project leads aren't fore-fitting their pay and bonuses until these things are resorted, mainly because it's always the foot soldiers who are the ones that solve the problems and management overseeing it has an overembelished value, if anything, in ultimately delivering on a diesreable goal.

I can see a disgruntled team of devs saying 'F it' after all of this and just making sure the whole thing ends in a big flame and jumping ship.

Which sucks because I got back into gaming to play Cyberpunk 2077 after taking over a decade off and wanted to see it all pan out, but this may not happen.