#public facing

Example that is given:

“Wow is gay” or “wow is feminine”

really translates to

“I’ve been your core audience for a long time and I enjoy your game [world of warcraft] and products but I feel the style and direction of the game does not try to make content that interests me and is almost a rug pull for the core fan base.”

Is that true?

This is partially true. Player feedback is totally right about the things they like or dislike, but is almost always wrong about how to fix any problems that they have identified or why those problems exist. If a given dev is dealing directly with public feedback, then the answer is absolutely yes - we must parse the feedback to isolate what the actual problem is, decide whether the problem needs addressing and, if so, come up with a reasonable solution for that problem. Devs that directly engage with the public are representatives of the company and the franchise, which means they are held to a higher standard than a typical shitposter on social media.

However, not all devs deal directly with the public. There are thousands of game devs that don't talk to the public about their work or collect feedback directly - I'm one of them! In fact, the few public-facing devs at AAA studios must undergo fairly extensive community management training because of the amount of ragebait they must deal with as a public-facing representative of the franchise.

Most sufficiently-large games have at least one community manager (or up to a whole team) whose job it is to collect player feedback (even the ragebait) and translate it into actionable information for the devs. Essentially, the community management team tanks all the crap for the devs so we can concentrate on working on the game. They get the recognition among the community for being the player community "face" of the franchise, but their work is often thankless and difficult in the rough times.

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I do like the idea of having an online portfolio where a candidate can showcase their skills, but I am not sure that a youtube channel is the ideal platform for it. I can see good gains to be had from doing so, but there are also non-trivial drawbacks. I'll explain what I mean.

First, doing personal game development projects earns top marks. There's no better way to stand out as a candidate than to have experience doing that work already and game development is no exception. Show us that you can do the job by doing similar work. Earning experience as an amateur will translate to leveling up as a professional.

Second, there's definitely a lot of benefit to practicing communication skills which you get from posting for public consumption. My own personal ability to communicate has improved significantly since I began this blog. The regular practice of posting to the blog has honed my skill at taking difficult, technical, and/or complex concepts and conveying them in an intuitive and understandable way. These are extremely helpful skills in a professional setting, especially when communicating with others who are not versed in the technical or design context.

There are also two drawbacks I see here.

The first drawback is in the choice of platform. Video production is extremely time-consuming - at the very least you will need to record the needed footage, write and record the commentary, add any needed visual bits (e.g. intro, outro, key art, transitions, etc.) and (most time-consuming of all) edit each video together. Most of these skills are not directly transferable to game development and are the primary reason I decided against going the Youtube route for myself.

The second drawback is in the public-facing nature of posting your work. If you get hired by a game company, you will become a corporate representative to the players of that company's games 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Your personal public posts will likely be read and dissected by the game's fans and used as potential ammunition against your employer. It is not abnormal for public blogs and the like to need shutting down (either temporarily or permanently) once you get hired. It may become a legal liability and that's not something you want to deal with while juggling a full-time job. I avoid this by staying anonymous but it's a double-edged sword - I must also forgo the benefit of having a public portfolio that I can show to potential employers.

That's basically the rundown. There's a lot to be gained from doing personal game dev work and posting it publicly, but you don't need to go all or nothing. There are really good skills you will develop by doing so, but you should absolutely be mindful of the major drawbacks of doing so in a public venue. I would encourage you to consider these issues and find a solution that you think will work best for you.

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For those who haven't been following this story, Helldivers 2 multiplayer originally required a linked PSN account in order to play. The PSN back end was not ready, so the developers turned off the requirement. Recently it came back on and several players were upset because their games stopped working. There was a review bomb and a lot of angry feedback, especially because PSN accounts are not available without a Playstation console in several geographic areas. [Sony posted yesterday] to say that they would no longer be requiring a linked PSN account for Helldivers 2 Multiplayer.

The situation is strange to me because there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for any real controversy. Sony is making all PC games that they publish on Steam require PSN accounts. That in itself isn't that big a deal - lots of publishers require similar things. EA requires Origin accounts, Ubisoft has their UPlay ecosystem, Activision has Battle.net, Microsoft has XBox Live, and so on and so forth. Helldivers was always supposed to launch with this requirement but they ran into major technical issues at launch and had to disable the requirement (temporarily). I know that Ghost of Tsushima will also require a PSN account for multiplayer.

The second thing with PSN accounts not being allowed in various countries is an issue within Sony itself and has nothing to do with Helldivers. The Helldivers team did what they were contractually obligated to do - require a PSN account to play. Sony's internal PSN team is responsible for which countries are and aren't on the whitelist for account creation via PC. Most game sales are in North America, Western Europe, and Japan/South Korea. There just aren't quite as many players in Uzbekistan or Ukraine. When your customer count in those countries is in the dozens, it really doesn't rank very high on the priority list.

Early on, I think it should have been communicated to players that they would (eventually) need a PSN account to play multiplayer and possibly some other "here's something for your trouble" bonus in game to help provide some value to the player. Now that it's blown up so large, the decision to step it back is probably the right one. I think that, for Ghost of Tsushima PC, the PSN linking should be a requirement for the game from the jump so that people know exactly what they are getting.

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