Is the "democratic game development" viable?

Hi everyone!

Modern game development is full of ignorance. Game developers could easily ignore what gamers think about their games and what they want to change in there. It is especially noticeable in mobile segment, but if we dig a bit deeper we will find it everywhere in different proportions. The feedback from users doesn't directly affect games, but rather is distorted in the blackbox of game developers' community process in favor of creators, not players.

I was asking myself a question - is it possible to change this development model in order to place gamers on the first place, but at the same time to make it as stable as the previous one. I think I found the answer and even started a project in this direction. It seems however I can't share any details due to forum politics regarding ads, so rather I want to ask you, do you think such user-centric approach could be viable? Any ideas?

Thx in advance!

Old School Runescape from what I have heard uses a fairly democratic system where all new features are added into the game are all vetted in by the players. From what I can tell it is also one of the more popular MMOs out there.

Aside from that, Dead Cells was developed as a Worker Cooperative. But that is more a democracy within the company rather than one between players.

Lastly, the nature of the market, means that players buy what they want. People voted with their wallet, bought Dark Souls, and now we have a lot of games following that formula.

@Maroxad: thx Maroxad for your reply, regarding Dark Souls that's 100% true, and there are also more "democratic" examples of the "wallet voting", for example, Dota or CS were once just popular community mods, pretty sensitive to community requests, in few years they became top games which shifted the market much.

I know about Runescape, they once had the so-called "Runelabs" process and I think it was a great thing. Unfortunately now it's out and there is the nice column that speculates why it was closed https://igeekout.net/runescape-shuts-down-runelabs . I tend to agree with their reasoning that it's not because players were inactive but rather because it was badly designed and implemented. I also think one more reason was that for game developers such a community process is uncomfortable in nature, because it makes them commit to players, so it was much more convenient to kill it than to continue and I think it was the wrong choice in essence.

Another game woudl be DayZ, which lead to PUBG. While not entirely Democratic, EVE Online also had successful player protests.

But yeah, as for democratic development. I dunno about this RuneLabs, but I do hear that Old School RuneScape (which is a seperate game), still has people voting on stuff. Which is cool.

Outside of Live Service games and MMOs, I dont see much feedback driven games for obvious reasons. Some games make chagnes based on reception of previous games. Sequels have made changes as a response to criticism from previous games. Some early access games may look for feedback and even hire modders for their early access games in some cases. Iirc, this is a large part in how Mount and Blade (which did early access back in the early 00's) operated.

No doubt game development has a lot of different approaches to it, but I think developers should make the games they want to make.

Eventually they will need to test it out, get feedback at some point. I think there are a few good examples of games being made in a vacuum where they just don't really go outside of development (Piranha Bytes games, bless their hearts, seem very much like games made by developers for developers lol).

I think what a lot of AAA developers do, which seems to be trend-chasing and building games around focus groups and surveys, doesn't really make a good product. It will sell well but sadly it just isn't that great. I think it creates a lot of burnout because you get these creatives working in the industry and they don't get to create, they just make the same game year after year and they're told what to do.

*Obviously take this all with a grain of salt; I don't work in the industry and only know what I've read and from what I've played.

It all works until Edward filibusters the alpha test because he didn't get his way on the boob armor for the elf princess. Thanks a lot democracy.