Culture Unity Research: 53% of Devs Report Rise in Toxic Behavior in 2023 - The percentage of those who experienced toxic behavior has also increased to 74% in the past year.

Unity has recently conducted a report on toxicity in multiplayer games that delves into the recent findings of a 2023 study by Harris Poll, commissioned by Unity. This study examined player and developer perspectives in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The study involved 2,522 players and 407 developers as respondents and revealed some interesting data worth considering.

According to the report, 53% of game developers have observed an increase in toxic player behavior over the past year. The survey's definition of toxic behavior encompassed disruptive play, harassment, extremism, cheating, inappropriate content, and other forms of negative conduct. In addition, players shared their experiences of encountering harmful activities across various game genres during the past year.


Image credit: Unity

Notably, the top three genres where players encountered toxic experiences were first-person shooters (51%), sports/racing titles (49%), and battle royale games (44%). Conversely, the genres associated with the least toxicity were card/deck-building games (23%), puzzle games (29%), and adventure/platformers (30%) in terms of encountering harmful behavior online.


Image credit: Unity

The also report reveals that card/deck building games had the lowest toxicity rate at 23%, followed by puzzle games at 29%, and adventure/platformers with 30% of players encountering harmful behavior online.

Almost all players don't want to sit idly by, instead, they take action. 96% of the gamers choose to use blocking and reporting as their way to fight back toxicity. Interestingly, 67% of them are considering leaving toxic games, and 74% have already taken action and started avoiding games "known for their hostile communities".


Image credit: Unity

In response to these findings, Unity proposes several recommendations for developers to combat online toxicity, which involve promoting positive behavior and fostering collaboration across the industry to mitigate toxic elements.

Speaking of Unity, yesterday we published an interview with Johannes Knop who told us about their game ABRISS where you build to destroy, discussed their brutalist art style, and how the game was created with the help of Unity. If you want to have a look at it, here it is.

Get Unity's report here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

Article Link

Archive

 

[Karl Franz]

93% gamers report continued rise in shitty games, their prices, and woke devs in 2023.

 

[SauceRyuKen]

You are on to something, but I think the rise of "competitive" games where gamers are ranked and stats are kept track of is the real root issue. The more at stake with wins and loses leads to people taking shit way to seriously. You seen this before toxic became a mainstream term with fighting games as people rage quit to preserve their W/L ratio. I never have much issue with players when match making in something casual like low tier warthunder, but when a loss can bump you down a league tier or cause you to lose a lot of gear or money brings out the worst in people.

It's exactly this. There's no fucking way you're gonna keep your mental strength through an onslaught of Brazilian schoolchildren calling you names as they go 0/12 five minutes into a MOBA match. That shit lasts for at least 45 minutes, more if you're really good. The solution's clear as day: Just let people leave the match. Slap them with a loss, but let them save the time. Replace them with a bot so the team's not a man down, and hey, if this dude didn't even want to stay in the game, the bot will be an upgrade if anything.

It's more manageable the shorter the game is, but as much as modern day journos will shake their heads and ask if nobody will think of the children, if you just let people skip games they're not enjoying, for whatever or even for no reason, I guarantee toxicity as we know it would disappear. If you're not the game's prisoner for the next hour of your life, whether it goes well or terrible, 99.9% of people would rather leave without saying a word than calling somebody a faggot nigger over their terrible K/D ratio. It's easy enough to carry teams to a high rank in a shooter, but MOBAs and the myriad games that ape the model (A lot of assyms, teambased sports games like Rocket League, the dying Hero Shooter genre) will test you even if you're the most tilt-proof motherfucker to walk the Earth.

Doesn't help that most of these games require you to be able to come up with a team of four schedule compatible, on-a-similar-level-of-sweatiness nerds to truly enjoy them. I'm a gamer. It's bold of you to assume I HAVE friends. And then you either let premades stomp randos mercilessly, or you lock them to premade Q and these four schedule compatible nerds have to wait until the game finds them ANOTHER similar team. Which can take 20 minutes. For one match. That might last up to 45 minutes. You'll be extremely lucky to play one or two matches of the game at that rate...

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

That's some nice ststistics you got there. Let's see what Driver Nephy has to say about them.

 

[6 Years Ago]

Imagine believing in the core of your faggot soul that you have the moral authority to define "toxic" language.

If making charts and graphs and articles about people saying things you don't like isn't "toxic" then nothing is.

 

[TowinKarz]

Fun fact the concept of behavior being "toxic" was created by a developer at Riot games to explain why players would be mean to each other and how it was the developer's responsibility to coax players to be nicer to each other. The term has always been framed as if it's someone's responsibility to socially manipulate people and police their thoughts. It's a term that frames things as if the end user is a problem that must be solved.

This is the problem with all of gaming these days. Just like government and media.

It used to be accepted and understood that you'll run into people online, just like in the real world, that you won't get along with.

Then it became unacceptable, but understood, and you got the modern nanny-net.

Those in charge of it see the end consumer not as, well, a consumer, a free actor, but, as a misbehaving child or slacking employee who they have the right and duty to counsel or punish.

And now, it's both unacceptable AND not even understood

Its gone so far now that those doing the "counseling" are detached from the whole reason that "bad behavior" happens and are spinning their wheels trying to solve what is just the outward expression of large groups of humans (X% will always be assholes) by conflating it with moral/political failings they bring ever heavier-handed censorship in to "fix".

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

Toxicity is gay shit.
I play Warthunder from time to time. The game has nigger towers, Russians teamkilling Ukrainians and vice versa, debates on who fucked whose mother harder, the works. And it still has somehow the actually friendliest community out there, where in a lost match you can just ask for a 1v1 with another fighter and usually the lobby will respect that, or the last surviving enemy bomber getting a fighter escort with aero smoke. It might not be a daily thing, but there's genuine humanity and camraderie between retards now and again.

Even then, it was the past way, and the only Right Way. The Right Way is to be fully server-sided and refrain from sending the client any unnecessary info (to prevent wallhacks). Client-side prediction and server-side rollback can then be employed to improve gamefeel without compromising fairness that much. Trusting clients with anything is always a design flaw, unless you somehow figure out how to make blockchains work at 60 Hz or something. ()

If you make a competitive networked game and don't do this, you are doing it wrong.

Got any reading material recommendations on client-side prediction?

 

[Creative Username]

Got any reading material recommendations on client-side prediction?

Not really, but QuakeWorld pioneered the technique IIRC and you could search the web.
Basically just do things client-side and server-side, and have the server echo everything the client does. If the client gets something it doesn't expect, correct it gracefully.

There's also deterministic lockstep which is really hard to do but works really well in RTS games.

 

[augment]

The end goal here is to penalize you for verbally manifesting expletives, ala Demolition Man, only instead of a printed voucher you have to pay, it'll get billed directly to your e-wallet.

 

[Creative Username]

The end goal here is to penalize you for verbally manifesting expletives, ala Demolition Man, only instead of a printed voucher you have to pay, it'll get billed directly to your e-wallet.

They will never stop the gigachads that talk by writing with bullet holes. Even if they make an AI, the bulletchads can switch to cursive and keep winning.
edit: i accidentally a word

 

[The handsome tard]

What counts as "toxic behavior" these days? Or rather, what doesnt?
Bullying is bad but, in a way, it teaches children that the world is a fucked place and that not all will be sunshine and rainbows.
People NEED bad experiences because it is through them that they learn and grow as a person. They NEED to be called retards, niggers, morons, thots, fags...because the world doesnt nor should bend to their limitations.

 

[NerdShamer]

Fun fact the concept of behavior being "toxic" was created by a developer at Riot games to explain why players would be mean to each other and how it was the developer's responsibility to coax players to be nicer to each other.

I remember those days. Apparently, Riot ran an program where an select portion of the playerbase volunteered to read through the chat logs and voted for the devs to punish them. Even then, it felt kind of petty.

I genuinely think this problem was caused primarily by matchmaking and didn't exist during the era of dedicated servers

Not exactly. It's more along the lines of being shackled to four other retards and making one of them sperg out because you didn't respect the meta and (un)intentionally throw the match.

What counts as "toxic behavior" these days?

Pissing off the rainbow brigade and the usual insults.

 

[xn--mck1c]

Why don't they go ask the Brazilians, Peruvians, Russians and Filipinos what they think needs to be done about "toxicity"? Surely, since they aren't bitching about it their communities must be some safe haven right?

If they really want player co-operation in team based games, perhaps ensuring players can actually read the language they queue for would go a long way?
(A language captcha of 1-2 simple timed multiple choice questions each time they start the queue? Some Korean/Japanese VRChat lobbies have something similar to stop people who can't even read the language from joining the lobby)

---

But of course none of the answers to

What are the features that make the multiplayer games enjoyable for you to play?

Are going involve actual aspects of games, be it fun mechanics, balance and fairness, no bugs, consistent netcode and hitreg, good servers, modding and customization etc. Because that's going to take actual work to improve, instead of blaming the players for leaving because of "toxic culture".

 

[Miller]

Funny how the chart mentions South Korea but not China aka the biggest cheaters and hackers.

 

[Slur Generator]

Anyone unironically complaining about TOXIC behaviour is automatically a faggot or a retard.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

the thing that nobody seems to point out is that the furries just existing in the server with me is toxic behavior

 

[Cpl. Long Dong Silver]

Fun fact the concept of behavior being "toxic" was created by a developer at Riot games to explain why players would be mean to each other and how it was the developer's responsibility to coax players to be nicer to each other. The term has always been framed as if it's someone's responsibility to socially manipulate people and police their thoughts. It's a term that frames things as if the end user is a problem that must be solved.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=irpLoGb4AI4I genuinely think this problem was caused primarily by matchmaking and didn't exist during the era of dedicated servers. As players could just leave and join a different server with curated moderation. Similar to discord.

I'm proud to be toxic and any nigger faggot who doesn't like it can kill themselves IRL

Doesn't help that most of these games require you to be able to come up with a team of four schedule compatible, on-a-similar-level-of-sweatiness nerds to truly enjoy them. I'm a gamer. It's bold of you to assume I HAVE friends.

Great point. If you're going to force me to party up with retarded foreigners, poor Mexican children and niggers with chirping fire alarms against sweat lords then I reserve the right to call them all the swears I want.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

The proper way of combating toxic behaviour us to tell those toxic nigger faggot whoresons to kill themselves.

If cheating is even possible in your game, it means it's badly designed.

Not realky. In many, if not most, multiplayer games, cheating on the client is inherently possible. There's only so much you can do to combat it.

 

[Megaton Punch]

The proper way of combating toxic behaviour us to tell those toxic nigger faggot whoresons to kill themselves.



Not realky. In many, if not most, multiplayer games, cheating on the client is inherently possible. There's only so much you can do to combat it.

If the server is authoritative, the only possible way to cheat is to gain access to information that you're not supposed to have. But even then, the server is giving the client the information, which is another flaw.

The real issue is that cheat-proof games require very good programmers. It's easier to hire a horde of pajeets to make your game for 5 dollars each and then bloat it with anti-cheat software.

 

[xn--mck1c]

If the server is authoritative, the only possible way to cheat is to gain access to information that you're not supposed to have.

There are cheats that based on automatically performing inputs with perfect assistance, aimbots, being the most obvious.
There are cheats which enhance existing information, making dark areas brighter, making sounds louder while visually displaying their source, or highlighting hard to see enemies.

Fortunately, community vote review systems seem to pick those up pretty well, especially the obvious, game ruining users. If community review can't tell if it's just a good player or a cheater, then they probably aren't outright ruining games.

Not saying, the devs should mitigate other cheats by actually only giving the client the information they need though, but implementing that and proper review systems probably takes more effort than slapping some 3rd party anticheat on.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

If the server is authoritative, the only possible way to cheat is to gain access to information that you're not supposed to have. But even then, the server is giving the client the information, which is another flaw.

The real issue is that cheat-proof games require very good programmers. It's easier to hire a horde of pajeets to make your game for 5 dollars each and then bloat it with anti-cheat software.

Well, you are just wrong about that. Consider, for example, a counterstrike aimbot. Everything that the client needs to cheat is right there in the framebuffer, regardless of how the server is programmed.