Toxicity (19/46)
We are getting back to the starting bet! A good example of this backfire is how Battlefield 6 got viral for being "just as good as we expected", but ended up facing negative reception, almost review bombing. Social networks are weird. As stated before, negative sentiment ideas are more likely to spread and get viral, compared to positive things. This phenomenon is well known in the news industry, for example. Doom-scrolling works better when you are picking bad news, because that triggers some "safety" mechanisms in the brain. Other examples may include things like: true-crime shows, where people are watching "horrifying" stories from real life about serial killers and other types of criminals, Rage-baiting – yes, again – in social networks, triggering anger, pointless arguments by intentionally saying something stupid or provocative, controversial behavior by public figures, like politicians, singers, and actors, draws attention because there is something bad to discuss. For games specifically, we see an enormous wave of criticism towards developers over the last couple of years. It really feels like most of the big games are released with massive technical issues, and less "successful" ones are released with a bunch of progression issues, unpolished gameplay and content scarcity. You probably are familiar with most common topics, if you are a developer, you probably have struggled with some of these on your game. The sad truth is that many of the problems can, and should, be fixed by developers, if given a chance – enough budget sustainability to keep developers on board. And we know dozens of examples of games like this: No Man's Sky recovered from near-death, because they had Sony's backup, DayZ developed from a completely disgusting half-game version of a free mod into an interesting and unique high-quality game, even Among Us , which was lost in tons of new apps on mobiles, got re-discovered by streamers and grew into a meme-generator and one of the most popular games of the year. And since we cannot really explain to players that every game needs time and budget to be finished and polished into a unique product, we can look at what is actually happening in reviews, to get a better picture of the dynamics of Toxicity Loops.
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