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How can people contact big corporations and get no response? Are the messages not being read? Or is there a weird culture of fear where you’d rather silently t

How can people contact big corporations and get no response? Are the messages not being read? Or is there a weird culture of fear where you’d rather silently try to fix it without acknowledging that it exists, because acknowledging a problem means taking some legal responsibility? It wouldn’t be the first instance of US law having weird effects on human behavior but it does seem a bit far fetched.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
> Or is there a weird culture of fear where you’d rather silently try to fix it without acknowledging that it exists, because acknowledging a problem means taking some legal responsibility? That is probably one aspect of it for sure. I think the gaming industry itself might have problems with sharing because 0days in games could really mean no more purchases, at least for awhile, and even then you have lost momentum from your marketing. Also, for non-zero days, just bugs in general, look at No Man's Sky or even more recently Cyberpunk 2077, so much social backlash.
munk-a 6y ago
I think game development companies are forced to take a very different approach from normal companies. Game developers face frequent abuse from customers due to passionate feelings involved with such an interactive media, programmers will get hate mail (generally vaguely directed at least) and female artists will get stalked pretty often - it's honestly a pretty toxic community. Look, for example, at what happened to Hello Games after the release of No Man's Sky - lots of people felt entitled to send death threats and demands to the developers - the UK authorities were regularly involved in threat assessment[1]. If some LoL players[2] are willing to swat the other team after losing a match then they're quite willing to go extreme lengths if their favorite character gets nerfed. I think this frequently toxic community interaction really impacts how game development studios interact with press and the public. The folks reporting legitimate bugs might just end up being buried in an avalanche of "BUG: My DPS damage is too low" that overwhelms an already tetchy CS department. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-ne... 2. I'd just like to reinforce that most of the people in a community can be fine - it's the crazies that start a lot of these problems, most folks won't swat you for beating them at LoL.
- tryonenow 6y ago
  To be fair, Hello Games promised way more than what people ended up paying for. Also I really don't think internet death threats are anything to be worried about. How often do people actually act on them?
- iancarroll 6y ago
  This is definitely true in general, but it’s worth noting that Valve pays HackerOne to validate submitted issues before they have to look at them. If it can’t be reproduced as a security issue, it will likely not get through.
inetknght 6y ago
> How can people contact big corporations and get no response? Are the messages not being read? Customer support is seen as an expense. So automate as much as their job as possible and then... stop paying for customer support.
userbinator 6y ago
How can people contact big corporations and get no response? In general, the bigger the company, the more bureaucracy and layers of indirection you have to get through to reach someone who even knows what you're talking about. This is regardless of whether the message is "bad security bug in your product" or "want to buy a million of your product".
davidbanham 6y ago
For Valve at least my experience is that’s pretty common. With the way they structure their company everyone works on what they want to. The result is that nobody chooses to work on the boring stuff so it doesn’t happen. I used to run some of the official servers for CS:GO and L4D2 on behalf of Valve. Mostly it was great but communication was always a challenge.
f311a 6y ago
Valve is a big company, but it has very small teams for CS GO and Dota relative to the industry.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago

> Or is there a weird culture of fear where you’d rather silently try to fix it without acknowledging that it exists, because acknowledging a problem means taking some legal responsibility? That is probably one aspect of it for sure. I think the gaming industry itself might have problems with sharing because 0days in games could really mean no more purchases, at least for awhile, and even then you have lost momentum from your marketing. Also, for non-zero days, just bugs in general, look at No Man's Sky or even more recently Cyberpunk 2077, so much social backlash.

munk-a 6y ago

I think game development companies are forced to take a very different approach from normal companies. Game developers face frequent abuse from customers due to passionate feelings involved with such an interactive media, programmers will get hate mail (generally vaguely directed at least) and female artists will get stalked pretty often - it's honestly a pretty toxic community. Look, for example, at what happened to Hello Games after the release of No Man's Sky - lots of people felt entitled to send death threats and demands to the developers - the UK authorities were regularly involved in threat assessment[1]. If some LoL players[2] are willing to swat the other team after losing a match then they're quite willing to go extreme lengths if their favorite character gets nerfed. I think this frequently toxic community interaction really impacts how game development studios interact with press and the public. The folks reporting legitimate bugs might just end up being buried in an avalanche of "BUG: My DPS damage is too low" that overwhelms an already tetchy CS department. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-ne... 2. I'd just like to reinforce that most of the people in a community can be fine - it's the crazies that start a lot of these problems, most folks won't swat you for beating them at LoL.

tryonenow 6y ago
To be fair, Hello Games promised way more than what people ended up paying for. Also I really don't think internet death threats are anything to be worried about. How often do people actually act on them?
iancarroll 6y ago
This is definitely true in general, but it’s worth noting that Valve pays HackerOne to validate submitted issues before they have to look at them. If it can’t be reproduced as a security issue, it will likely not get through.

inetknght 6y ago

> How can people contact big corporations and get no response? Are the messages not being read? Customer support is seen as an expense. So automate as much as their job as possible and then... stop paying for customer support.

userbinator 6y ago

How can people contact big corporations and get no response? In general, the bigger the company, the more bureaucracy and layers of indirection you have to get through to reach someone who even knows what you're talking about. This is regardless of whether the message is "bad security bug in your product" or "want to buy a million of your product".

davidbanham 6y ago

For Valve at least my experience is that’s pretty common. With the way they structure their company everyone works on what they want to. The result is that nobody chooses to work on the boring stuff so it doesn’t happen. I used to run some of the official servers for CS:GO and L4D2 on behalf of Valve. Mostly it was great but communication was always a challenge.

f311a 6y ago

Valve is a big company, but it has very small teams for CS GO and Dota relative to the industry.