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Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on

• shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  That is what was going through my mind while reading it. Entitled brats. They are a bunch of entitled brats.
  • RajT88 4y ago
    You can imagine a bunch of nasty teenagers posting stuff like that, but fun fact: Most MI fans are likely to be over 30. (Many over 40)
• bombcar 4y ago
  It's more than gamers as you notice, it's the whole 'self-reinforcing internet cycle' - if the first reaction is X, that will be amplified tremendously as everyone piles on to agree with X. This goes for both for and against, but against is usually easier. Famous examples include Dropbox (here), iPod (Slashdot), etc.
  • manmal 4y ago
    The Dropbox thread was not super negative, I just looked at it again. If your product is useful, there will be positive feedback. Haters gonna hate, that’s always been the case.
• zac23or 4y ago
  > Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen True, but Some open source communities are good candidates for "most entitled consumers". > I've seen it on HN also I will ever remember the launch of Dropbox here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  • jjulius 4y ago
    The positive-to-negative comment ratio in that thread is overwhelmingly in favor of positive. A couple of the top-voted posts are more critical, sure, but once you scroll past those it's full of support and inquisitiveness. Edit: Even the person who posted the top-ranked comment, with the more negative tone, ended their follow-up response with, "All of your feedback was well-thought-out and appreciated; I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!".
    • zac23or 4y ago
      > A couple of the top-voted posts are more critical A lot of people have the same critical opinion, only they didn't comment.
      • jjulius 4y ago
        If we're going to assume that people agree with the post, then we should also be assuming that people agreed with OP's general tone, which really doesn't read as negative criticism so much as constructive criticism. Again, OP's second post was basically, "Appreciate your response to my feedback, best of luck!". Heck, if we're looking at "people who agree based on upvotes alone" then "This is genius, because so many people have this problem," is the second highest-voted comment. There's constructive criticism (the Dropbox thread) and unconstructive criticism (the Monkey Island thread).
        • zac23or 4y ago
          The tone here is controlled by the mods. I don't see "hey, your job is super easy" as constructive criticism. I see this as an inability to judge your own knowledge and the efforts of others. But, yes, the tone is super polite.
  • throwaway2048 4y ago
    What does dropbox have to do with "open source communities"
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  Counterpoint: I used to feel the same way about the entitlement. Then I stopped and thought about how many "hours worked" the average game costs for a person on minimum wage. While the minimum wage has risen dramatically in my area, to at least $12/hr, with games costing upwards of $80 now, that's still almost 2 full days, after taxes. It's easy to forget when people on this board are probably all making at least low 6 figures. It doesn't forgive being a wanker about it, but it does help explain the angst over wanting every purchase to be a 10/10 game.
  • michaelgrafl 4y ago
    Being disappointed and being rude are two different things.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    Nobody has purchased this game, it isn't out yet. These are reactions to a freely released trailer.
  • tomcam 4y ago
    Compelling argument. Still, let me attempt a counter-counterpoint: $80 games tend to give 40+ hours of play, or $2/hour and the chance to play again. A movie in the theater is upwards of $20 and yields maybe 2 hours of entertainment, or $10/hour, and no ownership. Plus in both cases you can wait a while for reviews to come in.
    • setr 4y ago
      Movies aren’t the right comparison; they’re efficient. Video games operate more like TV — with lots of filler that you don’t want but can put up with, and can’t really skip because there’s probably something notable interspersed (intentionally, to make it unskippable). Honestly I’ve found that I can extract the vast majority of value from most single player games in a few hours (core mechanics and their interrelationships, anything interesting from the setting/world building/themes, aesthetic design, etc); some games can keep on trucking… but most of them are far longer than they are valuable.
  • 4y ago
• aidenn0 4y ago
  Because unmoderated internet comment sections on non-gaming topics are such wholesome and positive places?
  • BrainVirus 4y ago
    At least someone here gets it. Except the emphasis on moderation. YouTube comments are triple-moderated (by algorithms, by channel owners and by Alphabet contractors) and still are a cesspool. Think about that.
    • aidenn0 4y ago
      I added "unmoderated" because comment sections that are entirely pre-moderated by a human who cares aren't that bad (it's just way too much work to do so for any site that is at all well known).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• michaelgrafl 4y ago
  Well, they're gamers. Not that anything's wrong with playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're on average less mature than the general population. I think I'll play through the first two parts with my children and if they're interesed I'll get this one as well.
  • dgb23 4y ago
    You see the same kind of stuff from book/movie/sports fans.
• vasco 4y ago
  Most hours gamed are by kids, of course they're gonna be nasty, have you ever seen an unsupervised kid without threat of physical violence for being shitty to other kids? The fact that people care about an insult or attack in a comment section of a random site they read about a game is what surprises me. What lives some people must live for this to be something that even registers as an annoyance.
  • dgb23 4y ago
    I don't think most of these types of comments come from kids. "Entitled gamer culture" seems to be similar to any kind of culture around fandom, escapism, entertainment and sports. Some people just love to obsess about things and take their opinions super seriously, especially if they don't know what they are talking about.
    • novok 4y ago
      I actually do think the reason why gamers tend to be nastier as a group comes from them having a large group of children and teenagers. The vast majority of a group are lurkers, so you only need a small percentage of vocal jerks to make it worse. I bet most of the jerks and trolls in the gaming world probably skew younger vs. total gamer population.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  > I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. I said this a while ago as well[1], but there's a strong bias towards people who are unhappy with $something (for any value of $something). If you think everything is just great then you don't actually all that much to say beyond "hey, looks great!" Sometimes you can expand that to a paragraph of two about what you like, but overall it's hard to write a substantive comment. But if you're not happy with something then it's much easier to write a paragraph or two about what you're unhappy with. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454200
  • johnchristopher 4y ago
    I'll add that writing a substantive comment opens you to comments from the mob that disagrees and you can get sucked in defending your POV or simply downvoted because the mob smelled blood.
  • johnfn 4y ago
    This isn't actually true, though. Existence proof: Tim Rogers. The man can write a 6 hour video essay about how much he loves a game and not even be halfway done. The truth is, we all have the ability - though most of us don't exercise it for whatever reason. The real problem is that people like quick negative comments more than quick positive ones.
• ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Very true, 'gamers' are a strange bunch, not the average person that plays a few games but those that fully identify with that label. Huge amount of tribalism too, over which platform they 'support', they believe just because they use a particular service then they can expect all sorts of demands on it, rather than just casually playing whatever game they want on whatever platform they like.
• legitster 4y ago
  I'm not sure I believe this. There is an entire industry that revolves around video essays of how George Lucas personally ruined childhoods. The difference is that George Lucas lives behind a wall between creator and audience. The difference with video games is that developers themselves build parasocial communities for their games. Playtesting and marketing are so interlinked.
• jayd16 4y ago
  Its a big mix of tech-literacy, lack of empathy in anonymous posts compared to in person interactions, and the main demographic being in peak pubescent angst. Recently I feel like there's a large performative element to it as well. Like virtue signaling but without the virtue. I guess its just one incarnation of in crowd bullying. Hipsterism and the like, but this current incarnation has a lot more anger to it.
  • tehjoker 4y ago
    It's kind of strange. I rarely play games except a few best sellers maybe once or twice a year when I binge them (eg Horizon or Resident Evil). Because I see them so infrequently perhaps, whenever I play a new game I am astonished at the level of detail and amount of beautiful and well thought out content and feel lucky to be given such a large gift so cheaply (amortizing the hardware costs of course...). People that play more frequently I think have higher expectations because they are so tapped in they know what's new and what's old but it takes so much effort to create a novel experience that game designers have created a kind of red queen race for themselves. This isn't too say there aren't pointed critiques that can be made of the industry that mainly relate to profit seeking behavior (gambling, excessive grinding, lack of variety, etc) but it would be good if gamers could back off the intensity to these more important areas.
  • sph 4y ago
    The Monkey Island audience is not made of teenagers. Plenty of commenters on that site are fully grown 30, 40 or 50 year old entitled adults. It's so easy to blame teens when many people are jerkwads and get even worse as they age. Have you ever seen older people on the Internet? Those that are too old to be "digital native" and to have learned proper internet etiquette? They can be as psychopathic as any angry 13yo redditor.
    • jayd16 4y ago
      I was speaking more generally as to what could have formed such a culture and why games might be different than others.
• BrainVirus 4y ago
  >Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. Replace "gamers" with "book readers" and it should become obvious why this is not an insightful comment, but rather an expression of some kind of existential angst mixed with outdated stereotypes. Gamers ceased being a distinct consumer group when the medium of games went mainstream and ceased to heave anything resembling a coherent subculture.
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    "People who consume games" and "Gamers" are not necessarily the same group though? Just as the two groups of "people who have read a book" and "people who consider themselves A Reader of Books" both exist. The fact that there is a broader category doesn't make the narrower one useless. From my personal experiences absolutely there is a group of people you could reasonably call "Gamers" and performing dramatic consumer entitlement is definitely part of their culture!
    • BrainVirus 4y ago
      >"People who consume games" and "Gamers" are not necessarily the same group though? How do you know if someone posting a random nasty comment on the internet is a "Gamer"? How do you know if someone posting a nice comment is not? You're projecting identity on people and then project attributes onto that identity. Most likely you're unconsciously selecting who to project the identity onto based on the same attributes. This creates a feedback loop. This is literally how stereotypes are constructed and reinforced.
      • jayd16 4y ago
        It would be better to talk about the posting itself. Game post culture seems angrier than book review culture even if the community overlaps. I think this is what is meant when people talk about "gamers".
  • scotty79 4y ago
    "Book readers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen." What is weird about saying that? I'm very entitled book reader. And if the rest of book readers were as entitled as me many supposed literary geniuses would sell 5 copies before the word got out how pointless and horrible their creation is.
• headelf 4y ago
  The website is literally called 'grumpy gamer' so I'm not sure what the expectation was here
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    To be fair, some of this is indeed "crankiness returned" given how much of the vitriol seems almost directly based on Ron's older "If I..." written on a grumpy day post. Though I still wouldn't wish a 100x or 1000x return on grumpiness to anyone, and that seems to be the case here.
• extrememacaroni 4y ago
  Hackernews comments are basically a concrete instance of "the dogs bark but the caravan moves on".
• munificent 4y ago
  This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it. Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience. Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job. Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions. People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans. I think a lot about this talk by Max Kreminski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg In there, if I remember right, he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth.
  • belfalas 4y ago
    > Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.
    • corrral 4y ago
      I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work. Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad. How many people have anxiety-nightmares for a decade or more after graduating high school? How many unavoidable experiences in life so consistently generate that kind of thing? How many develop sleep disorders in school, that follow them for life? Depression? They're really, really bad. I had a quite good school experience and that ~6-year span is still, as I approach 40, far and away the worst part of my life. It's not even close. Nothing else half that bad has lasted even one year, let alone six.
• obiefernandez 4y ago
  Apparently you haven't dealt with NFT "investors"
• lattalayta 4y ago
  I feel the same way. I think critiques and criticisms have their place, but the internet does seem full of people ready to complain. The quote from the critic in Ratatouille always comes to mind In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so...
• oops555 4y ago
  "Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen." The industry is filled with people who are entitled, the idea that game devs and publishers aren't entitled when they've been stealing PC games for 30+ years since 1997 beginning with ultima online (MMO's were the industries bid to undermine the PC game market and back end every big budget AAA title, we got steam six years after UO, lineage in 98, everquest in 99, etc). That means every mmo would have been a regular PC RPG with level editor + multiplayer embedded in the exe like every PC game during the 90's and early 2000's before they figured out the average gamer was a computer illiterate moron. Windows 10/11 and TPM proves the average game developer has it good, microsoft is finally killing piracy and removing ownership of PC's with the help of intel and AMD over the next 20 years, so just remember, in Microsofts, intels and the game industries new hardware drm world, you will not have access to your games, you will be able to be banned from games you ostensibly "own" because the game industry has been engaging in industrial scale game theft and fraud by selling you incomplete software applications VS quake 1-3, warcraft 1-3, diablo 1-2, in the 90's. The entire tech industry desperately wanted to take us back to mainframe computing of the 60's where software and hardware vendors own your PC and you have no control over it. So gamers don't measure up into the giant ego's of game devs and publishers who literally lied to the public so they could kill the PC and jack up game prices and remove basic features like multiplayer. Google the list of all the games who've had their multiplayer shut down, that is only possible because the games are coded fraudulently to begin with, where as the 90's games mostly all still work just fine if you want to play them lan or over the internet because they were honestly coded local exe's.
• proc0 4y ago
  The problem is that the game industry is constantly doing bait and switch, at least for the last decade. They promise a great product, and then the product is mediocre at best and full of shameless monetization. Non-gamers may not understand the difference between a pay-to-win mobile game, and a story-driven RPG action PC game. They're both called "games", but they're in fact different products with different experience. Many of the game companies that made a name with "proper" games are now using the same franchises to create low budget cash grabs. I think gamers are just asking for companies to stop destroying existing franchises in the name of making more money, and often in the name of some ideology. If we say, well that is their right, it's their IP, then gamers also have a right to express their feelings on the matter.
  • moolcool 4y ago
    > The problem is that the game industry is constantly doing bait and switch, at least for the last decade I don't understand this complaint. Just don't preorder games, and don't buy games before reviews drop.
    • proc0 4y ago
      I'm not complaining, but rather explaining why there is so much controversy with every other title. People have expectations when companies announce a sequel to something they have already invested in before. That's where the most bait and switch takes place. Companies use the nostalgia as marketing and then blame their core audience, that has contributed to growth of the franchise since the beginning, when it doesn't do as well. I don't think I've seen a new IP get this criticism. It's usually previously established IPs, and sometimes they're old IP's from decades ago being resurrected because of their initial success, yet they change it up as if that initial success never mattered.
• kazinator 4y ago
  > middle ground between blind praise and mob bullying It's spelled out in the HN guidelines; if you see violations, then downvote/flag. In 2015, a new guideline was added; it's still right at the end: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative. " https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/new-hacker-news-guideline https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/new-hacker-news-guideline
• norwalkbear 4y ago