Today while I've been mainly working of a couple pages of the Collector's Booklet which will be part of the lore and enhance the game's story further, I left some YouTube videos playing in the background.
This one particular game, or its Developer to be more accurate, got my attention for a good hour. The name of the game is Yandere Simulator. It looks like a pretty legit unfinished game. However what called my attention was the horror story surrounding its Dev and his social media accounts.
It seems at some point he lost control and started lashing out at his fanbase, people who supported his unfinished game and which provided helpful feedback. I did sympathize with one thing in particular that made me feel a bit sorry for the guy. Someone basically stole the game away from him to create a "fan project" which was more like a standalone version of the game he was creating since 2015. Not cool!
There were guys who were literally decompiling the game to look at the source code and attack this developer for his coding practices, which by the way, was a solo Dev making this pretty original game on his own. At one point things got so bad he even suggested suicide? You can tell this guy was very passionate about his creation but lacked the social skills or smarts to deal with the pressure.
Out of personal experience, I still don't understand why some Devs are targets to mobs of trolls and harassers. It's almost as if these individuals triumph and feed off of people's failures. My personal thought on the matter is, if you can't come up with something better don't talk shit. I trolled in the past, who didn't? But seriously, I was a freshman in high school. Today you see grown men with no life trying to troll but they simply fail at it. Sometimes they need an extra push to set their priorities straight.
I'm always very careful with what I post on social media and sites like Reddit in particular, where the hive mentality thrives. If you go against the hive you get downvoted, if you're nice to the hive you get upvoted. The psychological effects of cyberbullying vary from person to person. In my case, I used it to my advantage to grow my popularity in the Tabletop RPG industry in the past. Now that I gained status, I don't care about picking fights anymore because the same trolls who tried to cancel me ended up being my free publicists, I did thank them by the way. I don't think they liked it very much!
But anyways, after watching all these videos and dumpster fires involving this Dev it made me curious to try his game. Even though I didn't end up downloading it, it appears as if he was going in the right direction and allowed himself to get sidetracked and fall in the trolls trap. That brought an old question to mind. Is there such a thing as negative publicity?
