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When Player Communities Revolt Against the Developer: A Study of Pokémon GO and Diablo Immortal

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Software Business (ICSOB 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 434))

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Abstract

Several popular contemporary online multiplayer games and franchises are developed and managed with the aid of multiple data sources. Despite the control and insight that the utilization of data brings to game design and business decisions, video game developers occasionally receive backlash from their player communities. Examples include the announcement of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon 2018, and the #HearUsNiantic campaign among Pokémon GO players in August 2021. In this article we analyze these two examples and demonstrate the importance of understanding player behavior more broadly than what can be derived from quantitative in-game data. In both the analyzed cases, players’ offline culture played a paramount role in the backlash. We argue that the primary reason for the observed backlash is that the players’ lives have become intertwined with digital products, and hence, changing these products alters the players’ lives as well.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Diablo Immortal, https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzcon/22653697/diablo-immortal-unveiled-at-blizzcon.

  2. 2.

    For Pokémon GO, https://pokemongolive.com/post/sep-taskforce-updateaccessedSeptember2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Samuli Laato & Sampsa Rauti

  2. Gamification Group, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Samuli Laato

Authors
  1. Samuli Laato
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  2. Sampsa Rauti
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Correspondence to Samuli Laato .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Xiaofeng Wang

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Antonio Martini

  3. University of South Eastern Norway, Bø, Norway

    Anh Nguyen-Duc

  4. University of Oslo and SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

    Viktoria Stray

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Laato, S., Rauti, S. (2021). When Player Communities Revolt Against the Developer: A Study of Pokémon GO and Diablo Immortal. In: Wang, X., Martini, A., Nguyen-Duc, A., Stray, V. (eds) Software Business. ICSOB 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 434. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91983-2_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91983-2_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91982-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91983-2

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