Stop Complaining About Games You Won’t Play

There’s a subset of the internet that views the mere existence of a game they don’t want to play as a personal insult and will make sure everyone knows it. Jeff Kaplan, the former director on Overwatch who is now working on the western survival game The Legend of California, had some choice words for people who do this while streaming his new game on Twitch: “Shut the fuck up. No one cares.”

Kaplan spent 10 hours on the Twitch channel of new studio, Kintsugiyama, playing The Legend of California this weekend, and during the stream he talked about how he’s seen commenters being “hostile” and “rude” about games they don’t play and have no intention of playing. Whatever these people think they’re accomplishing,  Kaplan says that this attitude isn’t going to make a developer suddenly scrap everything and make the game you want; it’s more likely to just get you ignored.

I never understand being hostile about it or being rude about it, but I understand being upset, and I understand voicing your opinion, but like, if a game comes out and you don’t want to play it, and you’ve never played it, shut the fuck up. No one cares. We don’t need to hear that you weren’t into it. What is with this, ‘oh my god, I’m so upset, they decided to make this game that I have no interest in.’ […] Who cares about my opinion if I’m not gonna play it, and if I’ve never played it? Why does my opinion matter on that? I’ll tell you what it does, as a game developer that’s been in charge of teams who has the ability to do something about it, I just fucking ignore you. That’s all you’ve accomplished. I guess I’m not gonna listen to you anymore because you’re so off the deep end that it’s not even worth listening to you, at that point.

Not that it will stop anyone who engages in this behavior, but it is kind of nice to hear Kaplan speaking without a filter on these things now that he’s not with Blizzard and can make his own rules about engaging with the public. Kaplan recently explained in an interview that he left Blizzard due to growing pressure to reach certain revenue numbers, lest the company lay off workers and place those lost jobs at his feet. Now he’s at Kintsugiyama working on The Legend of California.