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[–] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

A lot of indie games have amazing communities. Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program and Deep Rock Galactic, to name a few. Non-competitive games with active and friendly developers tend to have good fanbases.

On the other hand, a lot of indie games have incredibly toxic and user-hostile communities. Competitive games especially, though you'll also see it when the community becomes upset with the developer (such as 7 Days to Die and pre-redemption No Man's Sky).

And then there are the external factors. A game could become a meme or get covered by a pure cinnamon roll of a streamer and gather a wholesome fanbase despite its content (Doom 2016 comes to mind), or an existing friendly community could get overshadowed by a bunch of 4chan rejects if the wrong YouTuber covers the game (see any semi-obscure game reviewed by SsethTzeentach - I'm still upset about Starsector).

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Aww, I didn't know the Starsector community was ruined. I don't engage with it much though. The game is pretty obscure, so it needs any publicity it can get, but that's sad to hear.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    The official forums and main Discord are fine - the original community still hangs out there and remains chill and friendly. It's just the wider community (Reddit, 4chan, etc) that spawned after Sseeth's video that's a problem.

    For example, some guy on 4chan made a lovely little mod called R*peSector where you can capture enemy officers and story characters and... well, yeah. When the subreddit mods tried to ban discussion of it, the community went nuts and was like 90% in favor of a mod that adds explicit sexual assault as a feature to a freaking spaceship combat game, one where character interaction is a perfunctory feature that makes up like 1% of the experience.

    Seeing the new community rally around that kind of thing destroyed my interest in the game, even if by all accounts the dev and official communities are horrified by its existence.

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