I Don't Think Game Developers Should Listen to their Fans

Happy new year, everyone! Sorry that I haven't posted much since my last blog post but I have a little bit more time on my hands now that Christmas is over. Now, with that said, I want to talk about my thoughts on how much game devs listen to their fans. This is a subject that transcends game development but I feel it's not really explored enough from this perspective but I just want to start by saying this applies to musicians, filmmakers, painters, and TV producers as well. I think developers are too often restrained by committee and catching up with trends, which I feel is tragic enough in this creatively bankrupt era of media we're not living in currently but while you may think ignoring them and listening to fans is a good scenario, I can assure you it isn't.

To start, I just want to state that there are obviously exception cases. When a company blatantly ignores what fans enjoy in favour of some corporate demands, it's safe to say the fans know best at that point. There are many times when a series or even an individual game gets the design by committee treatment at the expense of the artist's vision that fans would have preferred. I'm more specifically referring to when a game is completely driven by an artistic vision, without meeting a specific expectation. After all, once a series has established roots, it's difficult to push away from them without disappointing a good portion of its fanbase. A series might even lose its identity and need to scramble through fan feedback just to nudge them in the right direction. In such cases, despite how tempting it is, the best approach is to simply follow a creative vision, and risk alienating a series' fans.

The Legend of Zelda series did, at some point, have a pretty rigid formula to follow. Don't get me wrong, they were great games, but they very much played out in too similar a way. You get three macguffins, something dramatic happens, get the master sword, get five more macguffins then beat the final boss. It started with A Link to the Past back in 1991 and stayed that way up until 2011 with Skyward Sword. Along the way, however, there were two games in particular that have a continuous legacy as remarkable games. Not just remarkable Zelda games, just remarkable games themselves. Majora's Mask and Wind Waker. They are both games that were hated by fans of the series during their release but have since become people's favourite, even compared to masterpieces like Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild. There's two thing these games have in common. They both make drastic decisions that were really unpopular to fans. People who played Ocarina of Time were surprised and confused at the change in formula with Majora's Mask, since it ditched the forumal in favour of a four dungeon set up with a far bigger focus on side-quests. If that wasn't enough to filter certain narrow-minded fans, they threw in a three day time-limit, with the punishment for it running out being incredibly harsh, with no way to save-scum your way out of it. This was such a change in formula that people would even debate about whether it could be called a true Zelda game. This was a case of the dev team not even taking fan feedback into account and instead simply doing whatever they wanted. There's more to it than that but you can see what I mean. If the team actually had time to pitch these ideas to some sort of focus group, you can bet they would absolutely be against it and we would be instead given some other linear 8 dungeon set up. Wind Waker is another example of this mindset, despite following the Zelda formula. Its art style was a lot more "kiddy" and relegated exploration to a vast ocean, both of which rubbed fans the wrong way (to put it nicely), because they just wanted Ocarina of Time 2. Both of these games are cited as the best in their series and while I might not completely agree with that, it's interesting that they went from widely hated to widely loved. The developers did what they wanted instead of what fans wanted, and as a result we got experiences unlike any other in the Zelda series. Now, from what I've seen in the many years I've been into this series, I can say for certain that fans never know what they want anyway. Fans will hate a game only to one day change their minds on it, and vice versa. Twilight Princess was seen as a refreshing return to form but it's since lost its fans (and it's worth pointing out that that game was made entirely as an effort to win back the fans that were lost after Wind Waker).

Zelda, as a series, is a unique case of having an identity but also not being afraid of alienating some fans and, for better or for worse, it's made the series stay afloat for all the time it's been around. If I had to think of a series as struggled with identity crisis, it would definitely be Sonic the Hedgehog. While I wouldn't call myself a fan of the series, it's impossible to avoid seeing the reception each new game gets. Sonic fans might be the most demanding audience in the world and yet they end up hating every game that comes out in some way or another. Even the seemingly well loved Sonic Superstars caught some flack for simply making Sonic a slightly more neon shade of blue, to the point of making a whole mod to change it. Yes, I'm serious. Mind you, Sonic's getting back on his feet but he had a rough time doing so, and who could blame him? Sega tended to use their C-team for Sonic games and they're always at the mercy of the fanbase, who really don't know what they want. One minute they want classic Sonic back, the next some Sonic Adventure clone, then they'll want a kiddy Sonic game and then a more grown up Sonic game. At some point you gotta wonder why the devs even bother listening. My only hope is that whatever they do next for the blue blur it's the best it can be.

I don't wanna catch myself simply listing examples so I'll just move on from that and explain that what makes a game truly remarkable is its commitment to a specific vision. They won't always be great, after all execution is everything, but my point is a developer unrestrained by outside influence is at their best. You just may trade off simply pleasing an audience by following their list of demands in favour of alienating some by exciting others further down the line. This point kinda circles back to my last blog post but these games aren't gonna disappear in a week, they will continue to exist for generations to come and continue to garner an audience that just may appreciate your efforts more than a narrow-minded fanbase will. If you set out to please everyone, you might be successful for the timebeing but your product will be quickly forgotten in a sea of stagnancy. If you're really committed to pleasing everyone, then that's a losing battle because no matter what decisions you make you'll never please every fan so just do what you want. To compose an orchestra, you have to turn your back to the audience.

Now that I'm done preaching to developers, let me end by reaching out to anyone that might be a fan of a series. The series' you love all started out the same way, as an artistic vision that was successful enough to spawn some iterations. It's thanks to you and many others for supporting the developers by buying the games that they even became a series. That said, when a game comes out with some unique twist to them, just open your minds a little bit. When that happens it's because the devs wanted to avoid stagnation. They don't do it be assholes, they do it because it's more interesting to experiment than to simply make the same game again. Instead of immediately jumping to hate it, just absorb it and see if what they do actually works. They should applauded for trying something new or interesting. Last of Us Part 2 should, at least, be celebrated for being brave enough to kill off their protagonist in favour of something different than blindly hated (although it was indeed poorly executed). After all, fans are not the game designers.