Fatshark engagement with the community is a joke

[Molonious]

@Ol_Jakal

no business believes they can control the narrative of their product online, they restrict their ability to even respond to avoid being dragged into irrational nerd fights. the fact we’re having this conversation in an offical forum at all is proof they’re more committed than the vast majority of businesses to interacting with their playerbase, but literally every time they make any comment the playerbase actively takes it in bad faith so they can blame fatshark for their own shortcomings.

There’s being unable to totally control the narrative, and then there’s abandoning it. Fatshark has abandoned it with Darktide. They’re not saying anything. No company avoids all flak or muffles all criticism, but simply doing nothing doesn’t help or mitigate that. Most players aren’t into or even aware of such drama, but are absolutely going to stop playing/buying when nothing is happening, and the numbers prove that Darktide has a dire retention problem.

As has been pointed out several times before, Fatshark can absolutely make a post about feedback and future plans without getting swamped in frothy edgelords.

I’ve posted this before and I’ll post it again here, the VT2 Versus Alpha test thread got nothing but positive and calm responses. Your assertion that anything they do will only be taken in bad faith and dragged into irrational fights is simply nonsense.

Developer Blog: Versus Closed Alpha Test - Lessons Learned & Takeaways

In this dev blog, Vermintide 2’s Design Director, Joakim, talks about the takeaways and solves that Fatshark learned from the Versus Closed Alpha Test. Greetings Heroes and Pactsworn alike, My name is Joakim and I’m the Design Director for Vermintide 2. In this dev blog, I want to look at some findings from the Versus Closed Alpha Test and give you an update on the state of Versus. To kick this off I want to extend our deepest gratitude to all of you who participated in the Closed Alpha Test. …

Notice there’s aren’t hundreds of angry replies?

FFS, one of the most recent topics is called “Official Fatshark Response: No updates planned for several more months” because “update news coming as soon as we’re ready” wasn’t aggressively hateful enough!

Yes the title was hyperbolic, absolutely. It’s hardly the end of the world, and by videogame industry standards is about as tame as they come, and the tone is still far below what you’ll find in many other games. If Fatshark can’t deal with that level of minor nerd-rage on a forum, then I’m not sure what to say.

When your CM comes out and tells “we don’t have anything to say” but that they’ll try to get a Dev manger to do their job and tell customers anything about what to expect out of your product for the year, and then dumps a patch a week later without notice, and weeks later still can’t get a Dev manager to say squat, you’re not just failing to control the narrative, you’re abandoning it. Simple as.

This community is literal sh|t-show and constantly makes an effort to be worse because admitting they have an problem knowing how to engage with side-mechanics would force them to admit they wasted their time and plasteel when they could instead have a giant circlejerk thread about it!

Ultimately, the community being a literal sh|t-show is Fatshark’s problem however you slice it, they’re the one Fatshark is looking to get money from. Other companies and products demonstrably manage this better, Fatshark has a real fundamental problem here. This community is incredibly tame next to stuff like CS/CoD/WoW/LoL/WoT/WT communities. It’s in the state it is because there are longstanding issues that FS refuses to address, and FS isn’t offering anything to look forward to. We see this reflected in play rates and player retention.