From the mind of an independent developer

• 29Nov 07

  How fanboys are killing the game industry

  The industry has been poisoned. Like the mighty Genghis Khan, betrayed by one of its own.

  What is this virus? It is the beast know as the fanboy.

  The fanboy spews negativity to anyone they can, telling untrue things about one of the gaming platforms, trying their hardest to influence family and friends to only buy the platform that the fanboy likes, getting jobs in game stores and starting gaming websites that coninue to spew this negativity and ignorance. I've witnessed store clerks tell people the most inaccurate things to customers who were contemplating one gaming console over the other. I've seen fanboys create false reviews of games they never actually played just to lower the overall ratings, bcause the game had potential to outrank their favorite game.

  Do you see the potential for distaster? What happens if more fanboys than actual gamers reviewed games and posted up websites about those games, tearing them apart when they never actually played them? People look to gaming websites for reviews of those games. When they see these falsely made reviews, they will think they are true, and think that a game is poor and in turn, not play it. This will cause loss of sales, which reduces profit for the publisher, who in turn has a quota of sales that must be reached before they will pay the developer even a PENNY more after the game launches. To make it simple, fanboys are costing developers money, and in some cases, their jobs. Studios shut down because of bad sales, they get tarnished with a negative image from poor game reviews. People don't buy consoles because their idiot nephew who thinks that 16 year olds know everything about the industry told them that the console was gay boring, kiddie or unpopular".

  As an independent, underground developer, I urge you all to understand that fanboys are a threat to the future of gaming and to stop them from destroying the dreams of struggling developers.

  Save the industry, kill a fanboy.

  • Posted Nov 29, 2007 12:25 pm PT
  • 12 Comments
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