Just who are developers making games for?

Over the last week, the gaming community has been alive with content creators complaining about nerfs to some of the recent darlings of online gaming. Helldivers and Last Epoch both had nerfs to core abilities that were supposedly used by elite players to take an unfair advantage, but were also heavily used by more causal players to complete difficult content. We also recently saw the launch to the gauntlet in Diablo 4, with players saying it lacked depth and complaining that you can’t view the profile or skills of other ranked players, meaning you don’t know whether the difference in ranking is due to skill, gear, or build.

I get a bit cynical with a lot of these discussions. Audiences often gravitate towards content complaining about games (looking at you Francis) more than content about enjoying games. And if gamers don’t have something to be unhappy about, they can come up with something to be unhappy about. That can make online discourse rather negative, even when the game itself is perfectly fun to play. But the tenor of online content sometimes seems to have an outsized role in game development. Sometimes it feels like the big triple-A games live or die by the approval of top-tier game streamers, and developers tune content around these players. That may make for positive reactions online, but it doesn’t necessarily make a game that’s approachable or achievable or even enjoyable for the rest of the playerbase.

Sometimes it feels like we’re playing in worlds that just weren’t designed for us. Do you feel like the games you play today are still being tuned for you? Would you like more control over the difficulty or the time commitment required to fully engage with the content? Do you feel like the developers who are quite happy to put their hand in your pocket for microtransactions respect your time and interests when they develop content? What would you like to see them do differently?