Is GGG still making the game THEY want to play?

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Paldamus wrote:

You may say what you want about "quantitative data and metrics", but at the end of the day, listening too much to the fanbase has proven to be a negative influence on many games like WoW. People, instead of adapting to the difficulty just wanted the devs to make the game easier, which they did... and then it got too easy and now who plays it? Like a quarter or third of it's peak playerbase. Most people are clowns tbh and hence if you think that listening to the majority is a good idea, you will be listening to clowns.

The key is to listen to the right part of your player base, not to everyone.

While I've never worked in the gaming industry, I have worked in growth roles in startups. What all of the recent hyper growth startups (e.g. Snapchat and Uber in recent years) have in common is that they have dedicated teams for growth.

One of the first jobs of the growth team is to understand the customers and the market. One common tactic used is simply talking to or surveying different customer segments.

Those segments typically look something like this:
- Customers that LOVE the product
- Customers that don't love the product as much (but still think it's a nice to have product)
- Customers that recently 'bought' the product (depends on the business model obviously)
- Customers that recently stopped using the product

The goal is to to learn where the customers that absolutely love the product hang out (which channels), what they love about the product, how they are different from other customer segments, etc. They also have to learn about the market size of their ideal customer segment and if it is large enough to pursue a business.

What I'm trying to say is, yes, listening to your fanbase can have a negative influence on your game if done the wrong way. You shouldn't make changes to your game based on feedback from people who didn't like your product that much to begin with. If you try to please everyone, you will please no one.

That being said, in terms of WoW I'm not sure that making the game easier is what lead to the drop in players. I'd argue that the gaming market has simply shifted away from MMOs. I used to enjoy them 10 years ago, but nowadays I have no interest in playing MMOs at all anymore. Obviously this is just a wild guess (I have no data to back this up), but so is your statement. We don't know why WoW lost so many players over the years unless we analyze what happened.

Also, about the 'most people are clowns' thing: It doesn't matter. From your perspective, yes, maybe they are clowns. But if those clowns are the ideal customer for the product and they love it and continue using the product, the business will run just fine.

Surprised my thread hasn't died. But I think it is important to point out there is a significant difference between complexity and difficulty. It is very, very possible to have one without the other and vice versa.

Make sure you aren't falsely conflating the two, or what little productive discussion this forum is ever able to produce nowadays will have an even lower chance of popping up.