Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up.

- Alex Hutchinson

So we have finalised our publisher, and therefore our budget and our rough release date, which means we are hiring a community manager – and I am conflicted about it. These days, having someone on board full-time who can communicate with players, bring news back from the battlefield of complaints and issues and bugs, or help your latest trailer find its audience, is crucial. More and more, however, I find the role and its impact on games troubling.

Interfacing too much with your audience during development can make the act of creation an attempt to satisfy a moving, poorly defined series of requests from a possible audience instead of a focused, planned execution of a (hopefully) fresh and coherent idea. Interacting too much with them after release has, we’ve seen elsewhere, created a hell storm of entitlement that has lead directly to deeply unpleasant online forums and generally abusive behaviour between players and toward developers.