Do Developers Listen to Consumers?

Games Radar quizzes a group of developers to check whether or not they listen to consumers. It apparently didn’t occur the Games Radar that if you ask developers those kind of questions they’ll probably not be completely honest, and look…

GR: Do developers really listen to gamers? Or should gamers stick to gaming and leave developing to developers?

Matt: The folks at our office definitely listen to what the fans have to say. On any given day, you’ll even see devs actively participating in discussion within our own forums or commenting on our blog. Additionally, I spend a lot of my time informing guys of any feedback, good and bad, that I feel the developers should be aware of.

Actually, that’s simply not true, Bethesda devs do not participate on any meaningful discussions on the Fallout 3 forum. But at least the rest is good…

GR: How are ideas/suggestions offered within the community relayed to the rest of the team for consideration? Do you have dedicated meetings for that kind of thing?

Matt: Generally I pass on these ideas either face to face with individuals at the office, or simply send an email over to the appropriate person. For instance, we’ve had some recent discussions about the Pip-boy 3000 diary Istvan Pely wrote for our Fallout 3 website. When I see interesting feedback about the Pip-boy, I try to loop in Istvan so he knows what folks are thinking.

GR: After a game is released and in the hands of gamers, what feedback is more important to Bethesda – what the community/forums are saying, or the opinions of professional reviewers/critics?

Matt: I think both are important in their own way. A reviewer is out there letting folks know what they think of what we’ve done, and if people are making a decision as to whether or not they should buy/play our game, that’s certainly important to us as those folks aren’t just reviewers, they’re gamers. They play lots of games, and we want people who play a lot of games to like and play our games, whether they write a review afterwards or not.

Community feedback is a different kind of feedback. It’s more of an on-going thing as those folks are much more likely to delve deeper into the game, find things most other folks don’t, and so forth. The feedback will run the whole gammut, but overall it’s important to us to hear what they think about the game, see what kinds of things they’re talking about, what kinds of mods they’re playing, and so on.