The only tragic thing is that people do listen to these when their abuse is quite obviously unfounded. As in this guy taking a successful game off.

No, that is exactly it.

We have an industry where people take success and use it to threaten death to people.

EA gains the reputation of the most evil corporation of the world; they release a free-to-play game and the developers literally receive death threats over it. Death threats over a free game. They use terms like "blackmail" and "force us to play" to describe a free game.

Not to focus too much on EA (I used to work at EA) we can also look at Activision, where the Call of Duty patch developers five months ago had death threats against the developers, the studio president, and (quite frighteningly) against specifically named family members. Death threats over changing in-game timings by less than 0.2 seconds.

Flappy Birds is not EA. It is isn't even a corporation, just one dude. He made the game, it became popular, and people started aiming the abuse his direction. People were writing him telling stories about his game made them think about suicide, others mentioned killing him. So he took the game down, which only further increased the number of death threats and physical violence threats. They range from the unlikely "go kill yourself" to the very ominous texts, not the least is a woman with a gun in her mouth threatening suicide if he didn't change his mind.

The more venomous the comments are, the more incendiary and hurtful, it seems the more positive the community reacts. Among so much of the game playing community there is so little building up, it is mostly a community of tearing down. So many people are whiny entitled brats who make demand after demand, and when the developers actually deliver on the demands, they always find some reason to hate it.

Maybe it is just old age remembering the past fondly, but it feels like it has been escalating for years. In the 80's and early 90's much of the visible community was through trade shows, magazines, and fan creations on BBS's. There was some negative content, but mostly people were appreciative of developers and treated them like rock stars. Fast forward this week and you see things like Flappy Birds and Dungeon Keeper: One developer at EA is told by his boss to put in a popup that directs traffic to one of two directions depending on if a user pushed buttons 1-4 or button 5, and suddenly the members of the development team get sent death threats along with their home addresses.

Really think about that for a minute and let it sink in: Imagine you do your job, and you produce a game you feel pretty happy about. It is a free game, it seems to have okay reviews up front, and it gets launched. In response to your free game people start sending death threats with your address -- where your wife and children are at -- posted anonymously online.

As nice as a game development job is (better than unclogging toilets) how much longer are people going to keep making games when anonymous death threats keep showing up?

The real insanity is that so much of the gaming culture tends to find it cute and funny or to simply dismiss it out of hand. At what point should we, as developers and publishers, start telling the community "This is unacceptable behavior" ?

People should direct their anger at the people hyping the game, not at the developer, if at all.

"I don't like this game (I don't like that people like the game) so I'll suggest the dev kill himself"

I don't get it, seems like the worst kind of mob mentality, it's cool to hate.

You don't like something then ignore it, simple as that, scumbags.

I completely agree with you. I just don't get those people sending hate messages and death threats. If you get so angry from that game, just stop playing it. Developer did you a service of actually making this game and releasing this for free so you could play it if you want. No one is forcing you, so if you are not happy with it, just stop playing.
At least that is what I think. Sometimes it really drives me mad what people are willing to say over a free piece of application no one forced them to use.

The only tragic thing is that people do listen to these when their abuse is quite obviously unfounded. As in this guy taking a successful game off.

No, that is exactly it.

We have an industry where people take success and use it to threaten death to people.

EA gains the reputation of the most evil corporation of the world; they release a free-to-play game and the developers literally receive death threats over it. Death threats over a free game. They use terms like "blackmail" and "force us to play" to describe a free game.

it might also have something to do with crap like this, you can't reasonable sit there and say "o we made it free to play, why is everyone angry?" when it really means "enjoy the first level, now pay us 10 bucks for each subsequent level". there was a time(and it lines up with your 80's/90's era memorys), when people were asked to pay once, and then be done with it. even the early days of dlc still saw this with months of in-between release, and actual new content.

now we've reached day 1 dlc, intentionally handicapping components to force people to buy, etc. maybe these people just don't like being treated like money cattle's to enjoy a damn game.

Even then, death threats arn't solely unique to game devs, really anyone famous is going to get them. but they are just that, threats. what are the statistics of people following through with threats? pretty rare that someone actually boards a plane to fly out to w/e to kill somebody over being famous. it's a tool used by people to try and force a change, but it's ever very rarely enacted. the fact that people can find info about your family this day and age is simply trivial to be quite honest. if you use your real name in the credits page, it doesn't exactly take some underground hacker to turn up info on you.

The more venomous the comments are, the more incendiary and hurtful, it seems the more positive the community reacts. Among so much of the game playing community there is so little building up, it is mostly a community of tearing down. So many people are whiny entitled brats who make demand after demand, and when the developers actually deliver on the demands, they always find some reason to hate it.

i disagree on this front, there are two things hurting you on this. A. your going to remember those vile posts far more than the good ones, this is a well documented psychological effect, the fact is you could get 90% positive feedback, but your only going to remember that 10% of hate since it stands out more. and B, people that hate your game are ganna make a scene much larger than the people that enjoy your work. if you sell a million copys of a game, and see 10k people that vocally hate it, you've still got 990K people that either don't like it, but arn't vocal, or enjoy it but don't think about countering those that hate it(or are simply not vocal enough about it.).

IMO, yes death threats are bad, but they are apart of the arsenal that people use to try and tear you down, not something people actualy follow through with(ok there are some crazies that do, and that makes this tool terrifying), but if you succumb to them, then all you accomplish is validating that method of attack.

EA gains the reputation of the most evil corporation of the world; they release a free-to-play game and the developers literally receive death threats over it.

While I agree that nobody forces anyone to play a game, I can nevertheless see whence this anger cometh from, if we're thinking of the same "free to play" game (which, personally, I find entirely uninteresting).

Thing is, the game (if you're talking of the same one I'm thinking of) is not truly "free to play", but is one of the microtransaction games which are so popular nowadays.
It's debatable whether this model "forces" people to play (or pay!), or whether it exploits gaming addiction in an unethical way (but then of course nearly all games do), or whether it is intentionally deceptive. I am willing to attest the latter, but that's up to everybody to decide for themselves.

Of course, almost all offers (everywhere) are intentionally deceptive, since we live in a society without virtue and without an understanding of decency, and with no penalty for deceptive, fraudulent, unethical behavior. On the contrary. Legislation knows no virtue, nor does jurisdiction, nor does law enforcement. Life teaches you every day: if you are honest and virtuous, you are stupid.
So why would one expect EA to be any different, or some random anonymous losers on the internet?

The internet is a law-free, anonymous zone. Of course that's an illusion, but people would believe so, and liberals/pirates would like to keep it that way.
Where they fear no repercussion, people risk a bit lip. The bigger the coward, the bigger the threat. No surprise, again.

If you don't like those death threats, find out where they know your private address from, and who they are. My address is not publicly available, is yours? There are fewer than half a dozen institutions (town register, social security, general credit protection agency, etc.) where -- knowing my name -- you can conceiveably get my private address from, and in all of these doing an inquiry means you have to file a request and show an ID. They don't just make info readily available over the internet.

Which means if you know my private address, I can find out who you are (legally). And if I'm getting death threats, the police will figure that it's either you sending them, or an accomplice you shared this information with (which is pretty much the same thing). Or you might wake up in a burning house one morning, but without a warning.

It's not like you couldn't pursue these people if you really wanted to (if they live in the same country, but what does it matter otherwise anyway). But almost all people have been conditioned to back off and avoid confrontation. It's the wrong mindset. The moment someone attacks you or threatens to kill you (or your family), he has lost every right (human right, constitutional right, or whatever). Sadly, our jurisdiction sometimes gives more rights to criminals than to other people.

Flappy Birds [...] became popular, and people started aiming the abuse his direction

Sour grapes, and no repercussion. Plus, living in a world where every idiot thinks that the world wants to know their opinion (and that freedom of speech means they're allowed to say what they want). Surprised?

telling stories about his game made them think about suicide, others mentioned killing him.

There is a word for that: internet. If only someone committed suicide every time someone posted about doing it. That would quickly solve the problem.

So he took the game down, which only further increased the number of death threats
[...]
whiny entitled brats who make demand after demand, and when the developers actually deliver on the demands, they always find some reason to hate it.

OK, but again... not surprising, is it? That's pretty much common knowledge. You certainly know that people always whine. Some whine that you need to change something. When you do, others whine that you changed it. When you make a compromise, yet others whine. Usually the same people whine on all three occasions. So what.

People who whine get what they want. We teach them to whine, can you blame them for learning?

Those stupid Greens were whining about nuclear power. Now they're getting what they wanted, consequentially the same people are whining that electricity is much more expensive. And they're whining that energy saving lightbulbs produce unnatural light and are bad for the environment. Well, duh.

In 3 months they'll be whining again because the big north-south power line which is now necessary will be running a hundred steps from their homes.

But the problem is really not them, the problem is everybody else. Instead of giving whiners what they whine about, one should just ignore them (or better yet kick them in the face, but this doesn't go well with PR if you want to sell a game).

In the 80's and early 90's

Of course, in the 80s, not every hobo had internet, err... BBS access at home. And you weren't nearly as "anonymous" as you are now (which you aren't, but people still think so, and you effectively are when you shouldn't be because of political fool's acts).

At what point should we, as developers and publishers, start telling the community "This is unacceptable behavior" ?

Death threats are always unacceptable regardless of what you do. The problem is that people are only focussed on themselves, know no virtue, and need not fear retaliation, so these happen.

Authors of table top games that encourage kids to do satanic rituals (*cough* lolwut?) received death threats from religious nutters during the 80s as well. If, instead of cowering behind a bodyguard, Gary Gygax had hired a hitman to kill Patricia Pulling... how many people would still send death threats nowadays, what do you think?

i disagree on this front, there are two things hurting you on this. A. your going to remember those vile posts far more than the good ones, this is a well documented psychological effect, the fact is you could get 90% positive feedback, but your only going to remember that 10% of hate since it stands out more. and B, people that hate your game are ganna make a scene much larger than the people that enjoy your work

In other industries I would agree with you. In games, not so much.

The first that immediately jumps to mind was Spore. Before the game was released it had several thousand one-star reviews on Amazon. They reset it, the game was #1 in Amazon's game sales rankings for several weeks but the ratings still were down around 1 star, mostly by non-purchasers. Looking at the game today (after the second reset of it's reviews) there are 2613 1-star reviews (79% of all reviews), mostly for DRM rather than the actual game.

Crysis Warhead had an 84 metacritic from critics, but on Amazon it has 66% are 1-star reviews, almost exclusively because of SecuRom on the disk.

Call of Duty:Ghosts, a critic score of 73 with only one negative critic review. User reviews were 70% negative, many zero scores ranging from mild disapproval to extreme hatred.

NFS:Rivals gets a 76 metacritic, but a 75% negative rating from players with tons of 0 scores because they capped the frame rate.

When the haters out there decide they don't like something they go to great lengths to hurt it. There are still people who daily complain to Civ 5 team about the AI even though the game was published back in 2010 to generally excellent reviews. The constant complaints won't fix the game, but they keep flowing in years after release.

In games it is often the haters who comment. They are loud, and they use overwhelming force. Those numbers show that it isn't 90% positive with 10% negative as you suggested (except for the real critics). When it comes to player review and feedback the vitriol reigns supreme, from the few numbers I just looked at the negative is 3x the positive.

I think ppl shouldnt put stupid troll threats and real threats on the same category..By real I mean ppl mentioning your address our family names or the likes...Stupid troll threats are everywhere, famous ppl will only get more of them, whats the big deal? ppl are brutal on the internet cause they end up as just texts on a screen, the more shock value the more attention, they just want to be heard..I think ppl who take those seriously should kill themselves ¦D (check this epic ending)

Plus, Im on the opinion that positive feedback doesnt do as good as negative feedback. Positive are just a confirmation, a "did that right", negative ones point your mistakes and possible solutions..

Not saying the angry mobs know what they talk about, Im also on the opinion that 95%+ of the gamers dont know what they want or what makes them enjoy a game. Its like that Simpsom episode where homer makes a car with everything everyone wants and the car ends up as crap.

Ok, this is just pure madness.

Now there are iPhones on ebay with bids for $99900, with flappy bird installed.

I feel like I woke up in bizarro-land this morning...

By real I mean ppl mentioning your address our family names or the likes...Stupid troll threats are everywhere,

Thing is, unless you are very careless, people don't just know your private address. It's not like you put your private address (and maybe your social security number and your bank account's password?) on your website or on your facebook page (or maybe you do put it there, I wouldn't know, not being a user of that stuff...).

At any rate, at least where I live, someone's private address does not fall from the sky or grow on the next tree. You have to be rather serious about it and get active to get to that kind of data for a particular individual (note that it is rather easy to get the addresses of 10,000 unwitting people if you are willing to pay a 4-digit sum of money).

I'm not saying that it's impossible to get to someone's address, but it's not something you do "by accident" or trivially by typing the name into google or private-addresses.com or such.

Therefore, someone who makes a death threat and shows you that he has acquired your address is not simply a stupid troll, but a dangerous dog that should be shot before he can bite. It's someone who demonstrates that he has been planning a murder.

By real I mean ppl mentioning your address our family names or the likes...Stupid troll threats are everywhere,

Thing is, unless you are very careless, people don't just know your private address. It's not like you put your private address (and maybe your social security number and your bank account's password?) on your website or on your facebook page (or maybe you do put it there, I wouldn't know, not being a user of that stuff...).

At any rate, at least where I live, someone's private address does not fall from the sky or grow on the next tree. You have to be rather serious about it and get active to get to that kind of data for a particular individual (note that it is rather easy to get the addresses of 10,000 unwitting people if you are willing to pay a 4-digit sum of money).

I'm not saying that it's impossible to get to someone's address, but it's not something you do "by accident" or trivially by typing the name into google or private-addresses.com or such.

Therefore, someone who makes a death threat and shows you that he has acquired your address is not simply a stupid troll, but a dangerous dog that should be shot before he can bite. It's someone who demonstrates that he has been planning a murder.

Yeah, I think I wasnt clear. I meant exaclty that. Real threats, like the ones with address, should be take seriously, but not to be compared with stupid troll threats.