Take the Diablo Immortal "incident", I think I found one article, at all, that covered the whole thing in a reasoned fashion. Every other post was either about how badly fans were overreacting and highlighting this tweet or that to emphasize it, without addressing the huge number of people who didn't give a shit, or the general questionable decisions of ActiBlizz leading up to and following that reveal, or trying to draw clicks by highlighting the (admittedly lame) sentence about "don't you guys have phones?". So one article that I would consider actual coverage, across dozens of sites and dozens more writers shotgunned out across the community consciousness.
There were certainly a lot of reactions from superfans that you could easily classify as "overreactions," but the thing that was most hilarious to me about the coverage was the refusal to implicate Blizzard in the
creation of those irrational superfans.
We're talking about a company that asks its fans to buy $50 virtual tickets to watch their event; asks the biggest superfans to spend
hundreds of dollars on hotel and travel to come to their yearly event; encourages fans to invest their identity into characters via things like cosplay contests, in-game
marriages, etc; has developers get up on stage and
literally chant things about the Alliance or Horde; asks megafans (
cough whales
cough) during the year to invest
truckloads of money into HS card packs, OW lootboxes, WoW subs, WoW cosmetics, HotS chests, and more...
And then, some journos had the audacity to
solely blame the fans for being jackasses (which again admittedly, many were being), without laying any blame at the feet of the company who fostered this crazy fanbase because they were trying to make a gigantic profit out of milking them dry.
Oh yeah, so sorry your prize milk cow ran a little dry and kicked you in the shin when you pulled too hard on its dry teats trying to get more milk out.
Whereas yesterday, we saw Valve write one, almost
completely innocuous statement, and people were totally ready to pounce on Steam and blame
them for fostering a "hyper-toxic" fanbase. When their actions in fostering a "toxic" fanbase pale in comparison to what most mega-corps are doing in the gaming sphere.
Give me a break.