Quote Originally Posted by shadowclasper View Post
Game dev here, no, no it's not. First rule of game dev is players don't actually know what they want in a conscious manner so you look at what they do not what they say unless you've pin pointed a specific issue and are data gathering about that issue and so look at what people say about the issue (if you're lucky, more often you look at what they say about things around the issue and try to use that to get an outline of how to fix the actual issue).

We quite honestly, as a rule, ignore fan boy rants or hater rants unless they hit a critical threshold of repetition among the various channels of communication.

It's almost all signal noise.

Games fail when devs lose track of the core demographic and early adopters who keep the game alive through passive advertisement and recruitment, often because devs lose sight of the forest for the trees through the process I described above, or the necessity of making money for our corporate owners overshadowseverything else.

Talk to artists who do commissions for clients, look at what they complain about in their client requests. Same thing going on here.
Well, good thing SE is ran by nothing but devs. We would be in real trouble if there were people who called the shots who put profits of the company over individual games they own the IP to~! ;^)