Cities: Skylines 2’s CEO states they haven’t seen any toxicity to this extent.
As fun as it sounds, working in a gaming-related environment is stressful. Crunch work hours, tight deadlines, and finding solutions to the player base can be tricky to deal with, and recently, Cities: Skylines 2 developers have had the same experience from impatient fans. Initially, the title was launched with a mixed bag of reviews, mostly about how poorly it ran and people expected a kind of patch to make it run better.
Even with beefy rigs, Cities: Skylines 2 was struggling to hit 60FPS, and when asked about the framerates, developers stated it was done on purpose to cut down on resources, so the game would run on a stable 30FPS rather than unstable unlimited FPS. Unfortunately, instead of helping devs guide what to focus on and fix, players just made fun of them for their way of developing games.
Social media, especially the subreddit of the game, was filled with specified harassment due to incompetent design. The factor of the promised editor mode for Cities: Skylines 2 not arriving made fans quite bitter as well.
In a recent forum post by the CEO of Colossal Order, it was addressed that the toxicity of players has become so high that their criticism is more likely to fall under harassment rather than genuine feedback. As a result, it pushes them to work in a difficult environment. In the forum post, it is also stated that if the toxicity and problematic behaviors persist, Colossal Order might stop taking feedback from the players and cut down on communication with players.
Every community is expected to have its own toxic members, it is the unwritten rule of the communities. It does not matter if it is small or big, the minority of problematic users can create tough times.
Colossal Order states they have not seen any toxicity to this extent before, which is understandable if your player base is comfy, relaxed city-builder players. But still, a small number of unwanted individuals should not be a reason to cut down the line of communication while optimizing your game, and getting feedback from players is the key to success in that matter.
