Former LoL PR chief says: “Reddit is not there for discussion”

Reddit is a devil’s pit for developers. The players there often deliberately play power games – claims the former communications lead at Riot Games.

Regardless of which game it is about: Each one has its own forum on the Reddit site, a so-called “subreddit”. The latest topics, exciting developments but also criticism of the games are discussed here. But for game developers, Reddit is something to avoid if you want good feedback – at least that’s what a former Riot employee claims.

Who’s speaking? Ryan Rigney, he worked from 2018 to 2020 as global PR chief of League of Legends, before that he had already been in PR and as a writer at Riot Games for 3 years. In addition to his work on LoL, he also worked for PUBG and Apex Legends – he began his career as a gaming journalist from 2006 to 2014 (via linkedin).

Some users might still know him as “Riot_Cactopus”, because he was very popular in the League of Legends subreddit for years. In conversation with Inven Global he was now talking about the downsides of Reddit.

“Reddit is about power and domination”

What was said Rigney leaves little good in Reddit. He is of the opinion that the discussions in the respective subreddit of a game have long ceased to be conducted for the purpose of pure discussion or to exchange views. Almost always there would be a certain agenda from a few players behind it, for example to get the developers to implement a very specific change in the game:

In 2021, we can say goodbye to the view that discussions in the video game subreddits represent pure player opinions. Reddit isn’t about discussions – it’s about power and domination. Only one opinion can win and that is represented by the comment that collects the most upvotes. Our brains are very biased when it comes to “socially validated” ideas.

By this, Rigney means: If we see that an opinion has received a lot of support from other people, then we ourselves are more inclined to accept this opinion as fact or as correct.

What happened with Reddit is that a lot of people understood this dynamic: when an opinion gets a lot of upvotes, it influences a lot of other people to agree with the opinion. If you express an opinion about a game on Reddit and it gets a lot of attention, you will see it elsewhere on the internet afterwards.

You have to keep in mind that the subreddit is often only a small part of the community – and often a fairly louder part. Even if only a fraction of the community is represented on Reddit, it can seem like everything in a game is negative right now.

Because virtually all Reddit users understand this dynamic, it also means that the game subreddits have changed in such a way that the aim is to influence the development of the games instead of discussing them. It’s just a fact and no one who uses Reddit regularly would disagree.

Reddit plunges developers into depression

Rigney has also already seen that Reddit can have real consequences for developers. Since Reddit often brings only the worst to light, this affects developers who regularly hang around on Reddit.

You can see them at work and watch the enthusiasm slowly fade from their eyes. I lived right next to an ‘Environment Artist’ who was working on ‘The Last of Us Part II’ and a certain part of the subreddit was dedicated to tearing up the game when it came out. That was crazy because a lot of people thought it was a great game, but my neighbor couldn’t see that bright side. He got depressed. He thought the crowd hated this thing to which he had dedicated years of his life. Ultimately, he left the game industry.

If you confront the speech leaders on Reddit with such incidents, they often go into a defensive position, explains Rigney. One can then simply claim that it is simply a matter of honest feedback.

[…] They then say things like, ‘I just think the progress system should be better, can’t I say that? That’s feedback! Players should be able to give feedback to the developers! ‘ You just can’t get these people to look at the bigger picture to have them admit that they are part of a ritual of submission.

According to Rigney, there is no point in discussing it any further, because that would always end in dead ends where you as a developer can only lose.

One of the top comments [unter diesem Interview] will be by the guy who says all of this [auf Reddit] legitimate feedback is based on X, Y, and Z. The best way to get power is to just pretend that power doesn’t exist.

For all that, Rigney doesn’t think Reddit is inherently bad.

It’s a fun website. It’s fun to see which comment on a news story got the most upvotes. I use Reddit every day.

But developers would do well to use other platforms to get in touch with the community. Discord is currently doing this quite well for many developers, because it is always a ‘snapshot’. There you talk to individual players and get different opinions without any particular opinion being emphasized.

It’s always worth going where the players are. But for this daily interaction, I believe developers should be much more selective.

What do you think of this view? Do you agree that developers shouldn’t give too much on Reddit? Or is Reddit just feedback that developers have to consider?

Sometimes developers give in to the demands of the players – and just play their game themselves, like with New World.