Make your complaints heard about bad games, says Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah, but "your $70 doesn't buy you cruelty"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Answering GDC's 2023 survey, 78% of respondents said they considered the harassment and toxicity developers receive from the public to be a serious issue. A simple sentiment is often the most effective, and the title of Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah's latest video cuts right to the heart of it: "Your $70 doesn't buy you cruelty."

You don't have to like a game, and you don't have stay quiet if you have complaints, says Darrah. You're entitled to be angry, and you're entitled to express that anger. "If you are mad at that Ubisoft game, be mad at Ubisoft," he says. "Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it." (Thanks, PC Gamer and GamesRadar)

"When you celebrate layoffs at a studio because the game that you don't like didn't do that well, you're crossing a line into being cruel, and fundamentally, you should have more grace for other human beings," Darrah says. "But if you're not buying that, let's go on to point two: you don't know what caused the results you don't like."

Mark Darrah! Are you suggesting to the internet that booting up a game doesn't instantly bestow you with a flawless grasp of development's every nuance like Neo learning Kung Fu? I'd call it a dangerous play, but since you've already suggested commenters try a little basic empathy, I can only assume your tolerance for having bile slung at you is ironclad.

He gives an example of the sort of circumstances that might lead to issues. "Say you don't like the line delivery on a piece of dialogue. Is that the fault of the voice actor? It might be, but it could be a lot of other things". It might be the fault of the person directing them, he says. Maybe the writer gave specific stage directions, or the recording equipment went down and they were stuck with an imperfect take. Or maybe the writer themselves was under pressure from crunch.

"Maybe the direction of the game changed radically three months ago, and they had to rewrite