The gaming industry is one of the most divisive forms of entertanment media, if not the most. Gamers are very passionate about games they love, myself included, ranging from clingy and demanding at best to rabidly toxic at worst. Such is to be expected when it comes to any true art form.

But as is also true, raw emotion often clouds our judgement and blinds us to the facts and truths. Such is especially true when it comes to video games and their creation process. What do I mean? Well, allow me to explain, and take you on an educational journey into our favorite hobby and way of life; video games.


Why bring this up now? Well there are many reasons, from the recent revelations of harsh development crunch periods to the explosion of popularity with microtransactions, but the thing that made me want to write this article the most was this video:

Anyone who even slightly knows me knows how much I love Destroy All Humans! So naturally I’m happy to watch any video on the subject be it praise or criticism, so long as it has actual substance to it and isn’t just your typical reactionary pundit schlock, like Angry Joe. (Note this isn’t an attempt to throw shade at Joe Vargas, I have immense respect for him as a person and an appreciation for the career he has built out of gaming YouTube, but he’s an entertainer, not a journalist. He’s a very passionate games enthusiast who plays a character for clicks and laughs.)


If you’re like me, you likely absorb various bits of gaming news from YouTubers like the Balding Plebs, linked above, or MrMattyPlays, JorRaptor, gameranx, etc. But as informative as they may be, or entertaining as they may be, none of them are actually genuine journalists and often cite the works of genuine journalists from gaming news sites like GameSpot or IGN when presenting information.

When I saw the Balding Plebs’ video, though, it became very clear it was reactionary pundit schlock being presented as informative and educational. But this video is not something anyone should take seriously. You can find my comment reply on the video for full details, but to summarize, the video is about why you should not buy Destroy All Humans! DNA Collector’s Edition, where two young men proceed to swear like home alone teenagers and assign arbitrary values to each of the items on display without any real knowledge of how they’re made or what they actually cost.


It’s unprofessional, disingenuous and misinformative. As a matter of fact, many game pundits like Jim Sterling have great, well-researched videos on various topics relevant to gaming, but they still seem to not have a good understanding of game design as a whole and they tend to paint game publishers and even developers as these sneering, greedy, mustache-twirling corporate villains who dump nuclear waste on baby seals for giggles.

That’s not to say EA and Activision don’t have predatory microtransactions in their products, Jim is certainly right there and such fraudulent and corrupt business practices should indeed be called out. But, we’re not living inside an 80s Captain Planet cartoon and real life isn’t so clear-cut or black and white.


Misconception: ‘The publisher rakes in all the profits.’



This is flat out untrue. As well-presented and informative as Jim Sterling’s ‘Jimquisition’ videos can be, they always portray game publishers as corporate entities who always get all the profits. This is not the case.


In truth, the publisher gains 30% of all game profits, while the rest is divvied up between distributors like Microsoft, Sony, Valve and Epic Games, as well as various retail outlets like WalMart, Gamestop, Best Buy, Amazon and so on. The developers get a cut as well, obviously, of 15%, which to put it in perspective is $9 for every full-retail priced $60 game. That’s also $9 per $60 that needs to be divided between each individual dev team member, which as you can imagine is pennies for huge 800-head count development teams.


When it was revealed that Rockstar forced its employees into devastating crunch periods to get Red Dead Redemption II out on time, gamers started a boycott for the game in order to ‘teach Rockstar a lesson,’ but the only people in that situation getting hurt by the boycott were the developers. We must also keep in mind that if a game doesn’t meet expectations, a publisher may likely dissolve a studio and lay off dozens of employees, such as what happened with TellTale Games.

Boycotts aren’t the answer, they hurt the worker far more than their employer. It’s possible to make a big stink about shady business practices while also supporting the developers. They’re not mutually exclusive and we don’t need to put people out of a job just to spite their bosses. Remember, developers are people, they have families just like the rest of us.


Misconception: ‘Developers control every aspect of the development process.’



Most gamers often forget that developers are under someone else’s thumb. Game development itself is a blanket term for all the different jobs different developers are responsible for. Game design isn’t a handful of gnomes making a game by banging a computer with magic hammers. Game design requires:

Artists. These include environment artists, character artists, item and weapon artists, building and architecture artists, etc. They’re responsible for designing everything we see in the game.

Writers. These people are responsible for the game’s story and dialogue.

Programmers. These people build the game’s skeletal foundation and program everything from collision detection to NPC AI.

Q/A Testers. They’re responsible for playing the game, often the exact same part, over and over dozens or even hundreds of times looking for bugs. They’re even tasked with trying to break the game on purpose, just to test its stability.

Community Manager. This person acts as the face of the studio on social media and acts as a mediator between the developers and the consumer base.



Director. This person oversees all other aspects of development.

And these are just the game design roles that are most visible to us, each dev team is made up of dozens of different people working on dozens of different tasks. This is why teams with only a few people are considered impressive, all these people have to take on multiple roles. Hello Games was only 14 people when the studio first released No Man’s Sky. Black Forest Games, the studio behind the Destroy All Humans! remake, is currently 70 people and growing, which is only 30 less people than worked on Skyrim.


What are some examples of things the developers don’t have control over? PR and Marketing, which are the domain of the publisher, who will often spend a few million dollars on commercials and ads, merchandise and such. Indie devs not beholden to any publisher will deal with this aspect themselves though, which is one reason you may not even hear of some games from small indie studios. Take GreedFall from Spiders, for example, which is a third person action RPG coming out on September 10th.

In regard to the Bethesda nylon bag incident, Todd Howard’s team Bethesda Game Studios would have had little to do with the Collector’s Edition merchandise, as Bethesda Softworks’ responsibility as publisher would be to handle all of that. Which means, yes, people were sending hate mail to Todd when he didn’t even have anything to do with it.


During E3 2019, THQ Nordic executives confirmed that they were looking into collector’s editions for Destroy All Humans! in an interview with IGN. (The very same one that gave us ‘Can we appreciate the cow?’) When I reported such on this very blog, some of the BFG employees actually asked me where I got my information through the official Destroy All Humans! discord channel, as they had no idea a collector’s edition was even being planned at that time.

Myth: ‘Developers release bad games on purpose to rip you off.’



Most infamously, when No Man’s Sky originally released three years ago to mediocre reviews and rabid disappointment, studio Hello Games were dead silent for months, leading to wild conspiracy theories about how co-founder Sean Murray took the profits and fled to Honolulu and other such nonsense. The studio also received numerous death and bomb threats, one of which was simply because the game didn’t have any butterflies. People on the subreddit were posting toxic hate posts and photographing the empty studio on a sunday with threats of vandalism. It got so bad the tiny studio even needed to get Scotland Yard involved!




Ice Cream With a No Man’s Sky Redditor by /u/aaaaarrrrggggg

The truth, however, is far less scandalous. Hello Games’ studio in the UK was flooded in December 2013 and much of the work on No Man’s Sky had been lost. As a result the studio ran out of funds and needed to release the game in an unfinished state in order to keep the company from going under. Unfotunately due to a complete lack of professional PR representatives, and the only face of the company being the incredibly adorkable and shy Sean Murray, the studio failed to accurately communicate any of this to the public. Sony also threw the studio under the bus during the entire fiasco, even though being a time-limited publisher for the game made them partially responsible.


Something all gamers must remember is that no developer ever sets out to make a bad game on purpose. They’re people like us who spend years of their lives working to create an interactive magnum opus. If they’re too ambitious in their vision or take risks, it won’t always pay off. The publisher may step in and radically alter the devs’ vision for the game because they think their idea might sell more. Game development isn’t set in stone either, a lot can and will change between pre-alpha and when the game goes gold. Just because a developer says they’re aiming to implement something doesn’t mean they’ll definitely be able to, for reasons of time, money and/or hardware limitations.

Remember that game development is ultimately a business.



Developers, regardless of their passion for what they do, still need to put food on the table. And publishers only understand one thing; sales data. If you have a favorite series and developer, you should support their games by buying them. It’s as simple as that. Because at the end of the day that logo you desperately try to skip as your game boots up isn’t your bestest friend any more than a cereal mascot is. They need to sell their product, so they want to make it look good to you.


CD Projekt Red is fantastic at manipulating gamers beyond the appeal of their games’ gameplay. For example, capitalizing on criticism toward their competitors’ microtransactions by releasing a large string of ‘free DLC’ (which in reality is all just faff they could have patched in through a small update), or sending out signed, personalized thank you letters with their limited editions. (Which their PR guy wrote up for them in an afternoon, had them sign it and then mass copied it.) Nevermind that CDPR were also ousted as having horrible crunch times, but I digress.

This isn’t to say that the individuals themselves are inherently bad people, as a matter of fact I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with individual devs on multiple occasions and they all have seemed to be genuinely great people. Special shout outs go to Zyddie and Mina from Black Forest Games, who are active on the Destroy All Humans! discord channel and chat with the fans regularly. But collectively, they are a business and they need to make a profit to survive.


At capitalism’s core, there’s a certain thing known as supply and demand. Value is subjective, as a game developer may supply a game we aren’t demanding, but we may still buy it and find we enjoy it anyway. There is no objective price for any commodity, a business can sell their product at any price they wish, and it is the consumer’s perogative whether or not the product being offered is worth that price.



A simple loaf of bread would be worth its weight in gold to the homeless, but a wealthy man enjoying a roast duck would hardly even think anything about simple bread. One person might value a sapphire over a diamond simply for its color. Whether a video game is worth its asking price is entirely up to you and your tastes.


Price is not indicative of a game’s total content.



I also see gamers all the time saying they bought a game at full price expecting it to have content that matched their arbitrary and impossible standards. It simply doesn’t work like that, price is in no way indicative of amount. There are restaurants that serve an inch of steak tartar on a square plate with a garnish and drizzle of sauce for upwards of $80.


I see this line of thinking so often for so many games and it utterly baffles me. I saw it with Destiny, No Man’s Sky and even Fallout 76. These people will buy a game that costs $60 and just expect it to immediately appeal to them and last them for several months. It’s such a vapid and cynical way for someone to indulge in the hobby they love, not to mention naive. I personally buy a game only if the setting and gameplay ultimately appeal to me, price is usually always a secondary priority for me.

In Conclusion



There are probably dozens of other topics and examples I could cover here that I just can’t remember off the top of my head. Even with what I do know of game development, it’s all still just from the outside looking in. Regardless, I hope this piece has been informative and given many of you another perspective of our favorite hobby.


To be frank, gamers are extremely toxic, and part of that is due to simply lacking in understanding and dangerous misinformation and calls to emotion from gaming pundits who make money by dressing up and screaming at the top of their lungs about why video games are the devil. I love video games, they are my passion, my reason for being, but death threats are not okay. Toxic vitriol is not okay.

Criticism is good, but it must be polite and constructive. Your favorite developer will never understand why you’re upset if all you can do is send them emails about how you intend to rape their entire family in front of their eyes. It’s not socially acceptable behavior and it’s not mentally healthy behavior. My hope is that this article will drastically reduce toxicity from gaming communities through the facilitation of a more knowledgable understanding of how games are created. At least, based on my still-limited understanding of it!


To keep up-to-date with DAH news and my other articles in general, or if you’d like to watch me stream sometime, follow me on Twitter @SWJS2, on YouTube at starwarsjoshsmith, at SWJS on Mixer, and SWJS#3513 on Discord.

Unless Black Forest Games miraculously drop new DAH news in the next few months, my next piece will probably be a review of GreedFall. So... Look forward to that!


Stay happy, stay healthy fellow game enthusiasts!

