Am I the one that’s out of touch? No, it’s the almost half a million players who are mistaken!

Reasoning like this is why they must work at Ubisoft. It’s not like Ubisoft is known for their solid decision making.

This aligns with my experience of a very particular kind of game designer. I worked with one who, in a casual conversation about games where someone said “there’s no wrong way to have fun,” they responded with “yes there is, and it’s my job to tell people what the right way is”.

This is not a systemic issue, at Ubisoft or anywhere else. It’s a particularity of a kind of person who is deeply drawn to games, but who also doesn’t see other people as, well, people. It’s a person who has made friends with games and game systems because they’re incapable of being friends with, well, sapient beings.

Video game studio projects tend to have multiple designers working on them, with the creative director (or just “director”) and lead designer working on large scale design things - genre, core loop, etc - and progressively less senior designers working on progressively smaller, progressively more soul crushing design work. Think things like item design and balance. Weirdly enough, the ones who think they’re the arbiter of fun don’t generally progress very high up this chain.

Not in team-based design environments, at least.

I understand that there are plenty of reasons to dislike a game, ANY game, BG3 included, but how tf “has no right to exist” is supposed to be an argument? Based on what, according to whom, because what?