Rich Stanton
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Mark Darrah is a true BioWare veteran, having worked at the studio for 24 years before returning in a consultancy role to shepherd Dragon Age: The Veilguard over the finish line. Darrah is now freelance once more, and has been using some of his time to post YouTube videos about both the company’s history and future in what he calls “an unprecedented time for BioWare.”
Darrah’s latest video, however, has another subject: The more toxic elements of videogame fandom, which are much more of an issue for developers than some players might think. In a 2023 GDC survey of game developers, 91% of respondents said abuse from players was a problem and, if we’re being honest, we’ve all seen some people go way OTT at developers online. The problem feels even more pronounced at the bigger-budget end of the industry, where certain folk seem to feel that, if they’ve paid their money, that entitles them to open season on the people who made it.
The video’s called “Your $70 Doesn’t Buy You Cruelty” (thanks, GR+) and sees Darrah address issues as diverse as players celebrating layoffs to the kind of persistent personal harassment and threats that can result in the courts having to get involved. The former producer makes clear he’s not talking about folk criticising a game they’ve paid good money for or telling others they don’t like it, which feels like it doesn’t really need saying but I guess you have to be explicit about this stuff on the Internet.
Darrah’s issue is fans feeling they have the right to target random developers who work at the studio behind a given title, even when “you don’t know the circumstances that resulted in the thing that you’re mad at.”
If you’re mad at a Ubisoft game, says Darrah, “be mad at Ubisoft. Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it, [you] don’t need to go out of your way to cause harm to other people because of a videogame.”
There’s also the fact that, whatever someone dislikes about a game, pinning that on one individual or even a group of devs is just wild, and betrays a total ignorance of how these massive projects are brought-together. “All of this isn’t to say that you aren’t allowed to have your own opinions to not like the things you don’t like,” says Darrah. “It’s specifically to point out that you being angry at a specific person, you attacking a specific person is often misdirected.”
Darrah even accepts that, as someone who’s held an executive producer role on the likes of Anthem, he’s a fairer target for some of this ire: Better for those in leadership roles to get an unpleasant complaint or message than some junior designer who probably had nothing to do with the decision-making that led to the issue. Which leads on to a point that, again, seems obvious but doesn’t seem to be understood by many.
“Be aware that this stuff is carefully scrutinized,” says Darrah, referring to complaints and feedback, even the screeching kind. “Not just by the social media teams, also by the teams themselves. Arguably, in a lot of cases, to too great of a degree. The team is listening, I would say, often too much to what you’re yelling about and complaining about.”
Darrah has a particular and understandable bugbear about the kind of fans who grave-dance when layoffs are announced. “When you celebrate layoffs at a studio because the game that you don’t like didn’t do that well,” says Darrah, “you’re crossing a line into being cruel, and fundamentally, you should have more grace for other human beings.”
That’s probably what prompted Darrah to make the video in the first place. Following the lukewarm commercial reception of Dragon Age: the Veilguard, publisher EA laid-off a host of senior talent last month, including veterans of both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. Reports suggest that over half of the studio was either let go or re-assigned elsewhere within EA’s studio structure, leaving a skeleton team working on the next Mass Effect.
The layoffs at BioWare felt like EA was gutting a studio because it had no idea what to do with it: The boots on the ground paying the price for poor leadership, as is sadly the case in most industries. This is a view shared by some in the industry including Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, who tore into EA for abandoning that “institutional knowledge” in favour of “cost cutting in the most brutal sense. It’s always people lower down the food chain that suffer, when it’s clearly strategy higher up the food chain that’s causing the problem.”
As Douse says: “On a pirate ship, they’d toss the captain overboard.”
“You are entitled to your opinion,” ends Darrah. “You are entitled to be angry about a game that you bought—you paid good money for it. But try to remember that it’s just a game. Even more importantly, when you are expressing your complaints, stay away from cruelty. Stay away from targeting individual people, stay away from trying to cause harm, stay away from celebrating harm done to actual human beings … when you are personally attacking individual devs, you are crossing a line, and you’re probably attacking the wrong person anyway.”