Mark Darrah, who spent nearly a quarter of a century at BioWare before becoming a consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, has come under fire from a certain segment of the community.

Darrah is now a freelancer and has been posting videos on YouTube. He says there is a “toxic” part of the gaming community. In a 2023 GDC survey, 91% of developers said they had been harassed by players. Darrah’s new video, roughly titled “Your $70 can’t buy ruthlessness,” addresses this. He says you can criticize a game, but don’t go overboard!

“You don’t know the circumstances that led to the thing you’re mad about. If you want to be angry at Ubisoft, be angry at Ubisoft. Express your anger to Ubisoft or to the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it; you don’t have to go out of your way to harm other people over a video game. None of this is to say that you’re not allowed to have an opinion about things you don’t like. It’s just to point out that being angry at a specific person, attacking a specific person, is often misdirected,” Darrah said.

Darrah was also a victim of this because he was the producer of Anthem. But people who are junior designers, for example, should not be attacked. Those in senior positions had more to do with it: “Be aware that complaints and feedback are carefully scrutinized. Not just by the social media teams, but by the teams themselves. Probably too much in many cases. The team listens, I would say, often too much to what you’re shouting and complaining about. When you’re celebrating the layoffs at a studio because the game you don’t like didn’t do so well, you’re crossing a line into cruelty, and basically, you should have more grace for other people.

You are entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to be angry about a game you bought – you paid good money for it. But try to remember that it’s just a game. More importantly, when expressing your grievances, stay away from cruelty. Stay away from targeting individual people, stay away from trying to do harm, stay away from celebrating harm done to actual people…if you’re attacking individual developers personally, you’re crossing a line, and you’re probably attacking the wrong person anyway,” Darrah added.

Hard to argue with that!

Source: PCGamer