Counter-point: It matters a little bit. (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Sunday, August 17, 2025, 13:25 (10 hours, 3 minutes ago) @ Cody Miller

Oh, I mostly agree with you. I couldn't tell you a single person involved with most of the video games I play, and I think it's a good place to be. I mostly don't care--the only thing that matters (or should matter, at least) is whether the game is good.

I do think the expectation shifts for live service games, though. Maybe that's not true in all cases--are the Fortnite devs streaming and engaging with their community? I don't know. I'm not sure many developers are as active and open as Digital Extremes. I think it's really cool that it's like that, but maybe it is more unique than I thought.

However, I don't think developers can do it in half measures, but that's what Bungie does. They put out vidocs that seem like they want to highlight the people making the game to some extent, but it feels so corporate PR that it doesn't work. It doesn't feel anywhere near genuine anymore. Remember the guy that sort of became a meme for making noises for all the abilities? That felt genuine, like a dude who was truly excited about what he was doing. Well, he's done that same thing in just about every vidoc since, and it's felt fake as hell. Like someone saw the reaction to the first time it happened and said, "Keep doing that, they love it!" Only now it's forced and seems like they're trying to hard too garner good will.

Compare that to DE. They do trailers, of course, but they don't put out highly edited marketing vidocs. They just stream for an hour or two and actually interact with chat, show cool things they're working on, even at very early concept art stages. I'm sure it's actually all pretty curated, but they're not shy about letting people into the process, and the Warframe community has come to understand that we are seeing in progress stuff, and it'll probable change by the time it's actually in the game. Bungie seems scared to do that, and maybe justifiably so. But I think that's partly on them--they've curated their community to some extent. If they actually engaged in a cool, fun way, I think the community would be less bitter in general.

I recognize that some of this is bias--at the end of the day, if I thought the game was better, I probably wouldn't care as much. Maybe that's the only thing that matters. I like Warframe a whole lot more than Destiny, so maybe that's just where all the positive feelings for the Warframe community comes from, but I don't think so. I think it makes a huge difference to see the developers actually having fun playing their game, and playing it in the way their weird community does. One of their developers (or maybe she's just a community manager) often just does streams showing off her fashion choices and how she decorated her player ship and stuff, and it's just cool to see that she's actually engaging with the game on that level--it shows that they understand how and why people play the game. They're not afraid to just hop on stream or in chats or whatever and just fuck around with the fans. Everything Bungie does feels like they're trying to sell me insurance or something.

And look, this isn't criticizing the developers at Bungie--I'm sure tons of people there are super passionate about the game and love playing it and engaging with it. But Bungie the company kinda sucks at actually showing that off. I guess we can argue about whether they should or not, but when they treat making the game as some sort of secret black box that we can't see, it sort allows people to just make the worst possible assumptions about everything and I think it leads to the sort of adversarial relationship they seem to have with their community.