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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, he messed up the kickstarter, albeit not by purpose. That said, I'm surprised by how idealistic and passionate is Molyneux yet, despite knowing too well the ungrateful target of his products. I may sound harsh, but I really find the average gamer such a bad costumer.

> “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me, they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t.”

Seriously, who does suffer from such backlash outside of the videogame industry?

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The problem is the consumer has expectations. If you tell them they're getting X and you give them Y and Y is demonstrably of lesser value than X they're going to be pissed off. He just over promises and under delivers.

Now with that said of course he doesn't deserve threats, and I agree that gamers tend to be quite the vicious bunch. It's pathetic on their part. I still bought Godus, I was disappointed by it and believe Molyneux deserves criticism for once again delivering something that's not what was promised but I don't understand how/why people go to such extremes.

Kathy Sierra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra ) had the same problem.

There are various industries where this happens (heck, I've seen it happen in local mom and pop shops). I think it is the intersection of Molyneux celebrity status and being vocal on the internet and a high number of internet users (gamers). You probably have the same stuff happening with actors/musicians, but they usually not around blogging and raising funds through kickstarter, so while they are more public in a sense, they are more distant from the end customers on the internet. Also, they have assistants that filter that crap, forward it to the police, etc. Molyneux probably has his email somewhere public where he gets the threats directly.

I think it happens in every single mass consumer industry, not just video games. If you have a crowdsourced backing of half a million dollars, then that is a lot of people backing you. If you don't meet your goals it only takes a couple of angry nuts to get these threats.

Not sure about this. Maybe in other industries the threats are distributed across customer service personnel and don't make it to the top. The only case I can think of is animal rights activists vs. Huntingdon Life Sciences ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-gro... ) and that isn't even customers.

unfortunately gamers are more likely to be internet users and it is easier to threaten someone over the internet. i dont think this means that gamers are necessarily worse than other groups its just that the vocal minority are really vocal.

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