Ask a Game Dev

First, let me put on my speculation hat. I don't pretend to know for certain and I have no data. This is all speculation on my part.

Let's examine what generally makes a Souls-like game and consider why this style of gameplay might be attractive to indie devs. A Souls-like game typically follows a formula:

The reason Dawngate's system worked wasn't the voting on its own. Lots of games have post-game voting systems for player karma - FF14, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and many others. In these other games, the incentives to earn good karma are not super strong - they are usually mostly cosmetics. The main difference with Dawngate was that they tied a large part of their core pr...

Unfortunately, Dawngate's other features weren't sticky enough in a market that was flooded with other options. They didn't gain enough players to reach their target numbers over their first five months of open beta, so the publisher decided to pull the plug. I should point out that this was during a period where MOBAs were extremely prevalent. During that period, in addition...

In such a situation, it isn't the game itself that's toxic. We choose the words we use and the actions we take, just like we choose the buttons we press. There are options we can take as designers to modify community toxicity. Hearthstone limits player communication to emotes in game. There are plenty of automated policing programs to limit toxicity, including sending toxic p...

The answer here is that the community leaders/moderation team must enforce the social norms of the community early and rigorously. Any community will naturally self-select towards the kind of people who are ok staying within the established social norms - new people who don't feel comfortable within those norms will bounce off, while those who do feel comfortable within those...