Former BioWare writer David Gaider, who worked on the likes of Baldur's Gate 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the first three Dragon Age games (not including Veilguard), recently spoke out about an issue he dubbed "anti-fans" in an interview with GamesRadar.
We've seen it happen time and again: A subset of players and content creators catch wind of some detail they don't like in a project and make it a personal mission to spend the lead up to launch bashing the game as much as humanly possible.
Sometimes they'll claim victory with sales flops like Concord or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and otherwise pretend like nothing ever happened when a targeted game reviews and sells well, like Assassin's Creed Shadows.
"The difficulty is if, suddenly, you end up with anti-fans. Then they turn from what you want, fans who would go out and spread word of your game and get people interested," said Gaider. "But if you get anti-fans, they sort of do the opposite. They're very determined, suddenly, to see your game fail as sort of a lesson to others who would make games of the same type, right? And that, honestly, these days, there's some element of that present in almost all fandoms, but it's always sort of been there for RPGs in particular."
Gaider went on to explain how he's seen "fandom" culture exacerbate this problem. "More and more fandoms are making the things that they're fans of integral to their identity, and if it's integral to their identity, anything that affects it or insults it, insults them," he said. "So they are so invested in making it what they imagine that, like I said, if they turn into the anti-fan, suddenly it's their personal investment in seeing that fail, or seeing the developers who made that decision be punished."
According to Gaider, this type of hostility is pushing a lot of game developers to minimize their public presence. That can have the adverse effect of making it harder for developers to interact with non-hostile players or find needles of genuine criticism in the hay bale of angry culture war comments.
Unfortunately, the media and cultural environment that produces this behavior doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. We're even already gearing up for our next flashpoint. Alongside genuine concerns about Marathon's genre shift from Destiny and well-earned criticism of Bungie plagiarizing from the artist Antireal, a subset of players appears to have become invested in it failing financially in the mean-spirited way Gaider described.
