Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently. They have to put a flashy animated GIF at the top of every update notification, change the name of the game’s Steam forum to “Join Our Discord!”, and even reply to posts in the Steam forum saying “You should join our discord so we can chat about it!” as if a forum isn’t a good place to chat about the thing that’s already being discussed.
Bitch please, if I wanted to be in the hell that is Discord I’d already be there, you can stop asking.
It is so infuriating espeically when any attempt to interact with the community around the game is met by the developer or community members saying “Ha! Silly you! The only place to socialize about this is Discord!”.
I have hated the fact that Discord was eating all the communities I love from the beginning, but this long into this nightmare what I find so frustrating is game developers who rely on Discord for feedback and to get a sense of where their community is at, pretend that the subset of people who use their Discord is broadly representative of the people who buy and play their game when it just isn’t.
Battlebit is a great example of a multiplayer game that only listened to its most active members on Discord who wanted a rush style arcade high intensity flavor to the combat and facilitating those players above all else lead to the entire rest of the game becoming unbalanced. When backlash started to happen, the devs again only listened to the SMG rush style players who were constantly vocalizing in the Discord and making highlight clips from it and stuff so the solution was to further nerf sniper players because that was the class SMG rush style players hated the most.
The game is dead now and I can’t think of a clearer example of how Discord can be a major liability to a game community rather than a boon.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/671860/BattleBit_Remastered/
I am not even sure the developers realize even now this was one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the multiplayer community around their game which is even more frustrating.
I’m pretty sure the game died because the devs vanished, not specifically due to player backlash. If the devs stuck around and kept delivering updates things would likely have been different.
I think that is how people active on the Discord community perceived it from their perspective, but it was not at all how I experienced Battlebit die as an initial huge fan of the game.
The gun balance came utterly unhinged because the developers weren’t actually interested in reaching their fans and listening vs. just using Discord and assuming that accomplished it, and it became frustrating to play any other style than mindless rush smg medic because squeakiest wheel gets the grease…
Once the backlash and drop off in playtime started coming from the broader playerbase not terminally tuned into Discord, the developers were basically blindsided and unable to adapt so they functionally abandoned the game.
If you are Discord-brained indeed what your complaint about Battlebit would be is that the developers abandoned the game but that doesn’t speak to the context at all in my opinion.
Thanks. I don’t really participate on game discords and enjoyed playing battlebit. I saw very communicative devs early on and then nothing from them. I guess I assumed wrong.
Still seems like if they stuck around the game mightve survived