Quote Originally Posted by Halivel View Post
I wouldn't be surprised if the decrease in open communication comes partially from the playerbase becoming as big as it did. It's not a phenomenon unique to game development - it's something you can see in daily life in different communities as well, albeit on a smaller scale (something like discord servers centered around some topic, for example).

It's one thing to communicate with smaller amount of people that mostly share the same view on the topic, and it's another thing to communicate with a community that bloated in size and, as result, has a huge variety of opinions that are objectively impossible to satisfy simultaneously. And wherever creators and members of said communities like it or not, at some point those who're in charge have to somewhat distance themselves and decide which path they're going to take in terms of project evolution (which will cause some people to like and some people to dislike those decisions).
To add to this, I had a somewhat similar experience as a moderator in a discord server that grew in size over time, from like 10 users to thousands. It wasn't a particularly nice feeling to make decisions that would inevitably alienate some portion of the community, but they had to be done to keep the project going at all, because if you try please everyone at once - you end up with pleasing no one at all and potentially ruining the project entirely. The only thing you can really do in such a situation is to try to stick to a path that you feel is right for your project.

So personally here, so long as developers themselves are happy with what they're doing - I'd say they're on the right path. Even if some of those decisions feel weird to me at times.