Imagine an indie game exploding overnight. The game’s developer would be over the Moon, right? It’s their dream. Who wouldn’t want exploding growth?
It’s impressive, that’s true. But growth that happens too fast can cause a world of problems.
Actually, it can sometimes even do more harm than good. When you’re not ready for this kind of expansion and, yet, it happens anyway, things start to break down fast. You have rules in place, sure, but they weren’t built for millions of people.
And it’s not even the number of people that’s your biggest issue; it’s that those people will invent problems you never coded for. Scams, harassment, things that have to do with the black market… This all belongs in a corporate boardroom; none of it is on your bug list.
But that’s what happens with many online spaces today. The tools that are supposed to keep them safe can’t catch up on time, so it’s no wonder that scandals keep popping up left and right.
When Growth Stops Being Manageable
When you have a small platform and problems come up, it’s relatively easy to fix them.
A few people harassing others can easily be banned, and a weird glitch can be solved with a patch. You have room to breathe and the time to figure things out.
If the platform grows too fast, you don’t have the time for anything.
Forget about breathing because you’re now dealing with thousands of issues every single minute. Nothing can be fixed quietly because the moment something is off, people find out about it and exploit it.
Now add user-generated content to this, and the chaos becomes even worse.
In a traditional game, you know every corner of the world because you built it yourself. If the builder is a player, though, you have zero control over the map. There’s no way you can playtest the millions of experiences that are being created, which means that there’s a huge risk of harmful content popping up anywhere, anytime.
You can never be prepared, and the best you can do is react.
This is death for any kind of trust.
Players have no idea that someone in the back office is panicking; they only see someone getting banned for something silly, or they see that nothing happens to the person they reported for bullying. So, to the players, what this looks like is that you’re handling these problems in an unfair or even a random way. This tends to drive players away from the game – and you don’t want that.
After all, who would want to stick around that?
Scale is another thing that can turn internal problems into a public crisis.
A flaw in your security system or a predatory scam is no longer a ticket; it’s a headline or a segment in the evening news. Or both.
Just look at all the legal claims involving Roblox, which wouldn’t have become such a scandal if the platform were smaller. Well, perhaps it still would, but it would be much easier to detect and deal with.
What Breaks First When You Get a Massive Influx of New Players?
Whenever a game gets a huge surge of active players, there are specific things that (usually) go out of the window first.And while you might think it’s lag, graphics, glitches, etc., it’s nothing flashy like that.
What breaks first are all the systems that keep the game playable. We’re talking about moderation and safety features that write, keep, and enforce the game rules.
Basically, ‘features’ that keep the game from falling into full-blown anarchy.
Moderators Are Swimming
More than 84% of online players say they’ve been bullied in some way. Just stop and look at that number again. 84%! And think about this fast – this is only those who have reported some form of bullying.
Just imagine how many stay silent, or shrug it off, not wanting to make a big deal out of “nothing”. We’re talking about how almost 9/10 players who play online have been bullied.
That’s horrible.
And now look at the people whose job it is to deal with all those reported tickets. If the playerbase is huge, then the moderators simply can’t keep up. It’s not that they don’t want to, or they’re not doing their jobs properly – it’s physically impossible for them to do so.
They’re swamped, and they’re drowning in work. Unfortunately, this also means that YOUR ticket just might end up being ignored (not intentionally), but it surely WILL feel this way.
So what ends up happening – from the players’ perspective, at least – it feels like the platform lets bullying happen and go on unpunished.
Social Features Add Risk
You can talk to friends, meet new people, play games, and hang out, so these platforms are (generally) super fun. But that’s also what makes them super risky. All these chat features (e.g., open chat, private messages, voice channels, etc.) are basically gateways for trouble spreading. And there’s no bot or moderator/admin that can catch that on a regular basis or in any meaningful, reliable way.
Spontaneous conversation, the thing that makes the place feel fun and alive, is the hardest to control.
Community Rules
When the space is smaller, the vibe is different.
Some would say better, but the important thing is that, in a small community, everyone kind of follows the unwritten rules. Then millions of other people show up, and the polite norms mean nothing to them.
What ends up happening here is that a bunch of new players ignore those ‘unwritten’ rules, or etiquette – whatever you want to call it – and the regulars start feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, leading to some leaving and the whole ‘we’re all in this together’ vibe kind of dissipates.
Conclusion
If you’re a game developer or a game dev company, then you DEFINITELY want growth.
Day one – record-breaking player count, and you just want to go north from there. Sure. But if you get a number of players – for whatever reason, it could be after an expansion, after a super patch fix, or a massive game-changing update, etc. – and you aren’t prepared for it, what you get is pure chaos. Servers are crashing, people are exploiting bugs and glitches, and some players are exploiting other players. Basically – NOT fun.
And since the point of the game is to have fun, it kind of defeats the purpose.
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