Lemmy speaks out against the spiteful community
Edit: Mod believes title is misleading but I respectively disagree.
Lemmy speaks out about the community and the constant backlash from Reddit. He goes into how tempting it is to sell the company off and take it off his hands, as the community is affecting his and others employees mental health quite heavily.
Despite the enticing big offers from other companies, he opted to delete all socials for his own sanity. To step away from the community and focus on the development.
Here is a complete copy pasta of the comment if you prefer it.
"Hello Lemmy here - I've not watched the vid for mental health reasons, feel like carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders right now as we always are at this stage of dev, and in my naivety i looked at these comments and now feel like chewing my lips off my face. Am sure its fair as Duck is a fair chap, but I can surmise from the comments and nasko's comments to me what it involves.
We don't have ANY IDEA accurately how long the update will take. That's why we don't have 'release dates'. Most companies don't know either, and when they are invariably wrong because they are unable to divine the future, they either end up delaying or rushing out while still its broken. Release dates cause the most headache to devs and players in the industry. Careful what you wish for.
I in my unbelievable moment of delusion and optimism said 'if we don't get it out in beta in first half of 2024 then something's gone wrong' on reddit or something to that effect, little did I realize that there'd be further delays due to unavoidable and private issues with vital people in the team which also lead to the decision discussed in last Thursdoid to cut back on crafting, so yeah something did go wrong, but we didn't just slap it out there broken. So we put out a new tweet saying it'll be this year but still hoping my estimate won't have been far wrong. Goes to show what mugs we are every time we crack and feel we need to offer some kind of time scale, we get strung up by it when its inevitably wrong, next time we should just push it out half baked like most do and see how people like that.
I literally quit my reddit and discord account for the sake of my own mental health because I was drowning in this daily, not communicating has never been our problem, we're only human and doesn't matter how much we communicate millions of people will always have a million theories, misinterpret things we say in a thousand different ways, read between the lines of a line in our thursdoid that b42 is just around the corner when we said a paragraph sbout that 'we're nowhere near close', haven't read every Thursdoid, and so on, and when we ourselves don't know and are just trying to be honest and upfront about progress through a long and ever changing dev process about what we do know, its hard to know what we can do to avoid this apart from not communicating at all and just announcing prior to release in a marketing push like most companies. This is really tempting me to go that route in future.
After posting that Thursdoid last addressing the issues, everyone in the comments addressing this video seem oddly punitive. As soon as we release we'll be 'doing it right' for doing what everyone drags us over the coals for now. Been through it a million times by now, we're the bad guys, slow, incompetent, don't know what we're doing, feeature bloat, all the classics, all the 'hits', then we release and its 'wow this is great, damn am so glad TIS isn't like all the other companies out there [that do what I was chastising TIS for not doing a few months back]!!' I'm used to it by now and increasingly cynical and mentally exhausted by it.
And if we did what everyone else wanted we'd be like everyone else and hated for that. If you want carefully planned and managed and PR driven releases, welcome to the rest of the industry and broken unoptimized releases everyone gets angry about. Hard to tell where the line is where we win, tbh.
We're in the last stages of the update now as discussed in that last Thursdoid, we've finally reached the nirvana stage of people suggesting one of us should be fired which happens every time. That means we're getting close.
This is the most crucial takeaway I want people to bear in mind:
If we updating this game for another ten years, we'll never just pump out little content updates, apart from post release bug fixing and balancing, we want all our updates to be big expansions that are meaningful, our update dev cycles take no longer than games like Rimworlds DLC (my favourite game with a lot of cross over, and one that no one EVER criticises for slow dev speed), I literally measured up every one of their DLCs against b42 dev time on Reddit at some point in response to someone calling us the slowest dev team, and we'd not literally met the dev time of a single DLC yet as of that post, and yet we were being insulted for being 'slow' at this update. Was that kinda thing that ultimately made me permanently nope out of interacting with the community. We may have passed one of them or two by now, I'm not sure, but we're still nowhere near 'taking too long' for the amount of content in this update' and I'll stand by the team and say literally no one has done a bad job and have been amazing under the pressure of what needs to be done. Any delays at all have been down to unavoidable stuff its neither morally or legally right of me to divulge. If you want more of an answer than that am sorry, some people are key people we rely on and if without our ability for foresight these people become unavailable, there's both nothing we can do to plan for that nor explain that, these same people deserve privacy to not have everything going on in their life blasted out on blogs as excuses and details for why our plans change. When things with dev companies don't go perfectly, and this applies to all companies, it's maybe worth considering that there is a team of human beings with the entire gamut of human life going on for them daily, not an array of dev bots that can both run 24/7 and be perfectly predicted within a 1% error margin of what the future holds.
The idea we're 'slow' has become incredibly insulting to me now. The amount of content in this update is insane, we're giving this for free when we'd have been well within our right to 1.0 and release after a decade, if we'd done that, and were selling you this update as almost every game company in existence would be, *people would only have been finding out B42 even EXISTED last week's Thursdoid at the earliest if we were using a commercial DLC model. There's a good chance you still wouldn't know it exists and would just be counting B41 as 'Zomboid' * - we could be developing this in peace, not worrying about next Thursdoid, what a reddit post is saying about B42, so and and so forth and making $$$ from charging $20 for it to boot.. You're helping make it feel not worth it putting everything into the base game for free when you give us crap for 'being slow', our plans unavoidably changing, a single month's Thursdoid not being juicy enough, or whatever else. Most companies working on a product this long don't still need to deal with this. After like 13 years it's utterly exhausting and a constant ambient strain on your psyche and we've been subjecting ourselves to it way longer than we needed to for the sake of the game and the community having Zomboid have EVERYTHING we want it to have in it without any DLC models or sequels. We'd make 100x more money if we didn't do it this way and have a million times more peace and serenity while we do it, it sounds utterly heavenly for that second reason it brings literal tears to my eyes imagining it as I type. We get approached to sell the company and IP all the time, for a LOT, its sometimes tempting just to be free of this ambient eternal pressure, expectation and judgement. Honestly, don't make me talk myself into it any more.
People find out the expansion exists and was even in development a few months before it is released during the marketing push after secret development for a year +, then compare those few months with us developing the entire thing from scratch. We're getting punished for giving it away free and involving people in our game dev process from inception to release. Then get criticised there are occasionally errors and changed plans month to month and not everyone in our community is on the most up to date information. People quote 3 years since last release but our last update was 1.5 years ago or so, well within reasonable dev time of such a large content update. I used to for an easy life apologise for this and say 'yes we're slow' but its gotten to the point I feel I'm letting our team down for saying that. We're slower cause we don't do crunch, we look after the staff, don't limit holidays arbitrarily and are liberal with paid leave for mental health reasons and such, we work over the internet not in an office so we don't keep people tied to their desk X hours a day, likewise the staff are fair to us with their time and want to push themselves because they aren't pushed to mental exhaustion,. Yep we're likely a bit slower than companies who treat their staff much worse. BUT NOT MUCH SLOWER AT ALL.
Won't be addressing the community again, those days are over am afraid its too exhausting to spill my soul like this, and too distracting from the million plates I've got to spin, I had my fill on reddit saying the same thing over and over and travelling toward an early grave so had to literally stop even looking at that community, and will leave it to our community manager (who won't be retrained / replaced as someone here suggested, and who has literally no final godlike word with what management puts out in Thursdoids nor my own ill fated reddit post.)"
