Former Dragon Age producer says devs shouldn't use player feedback as design blueprint: "they're not developers, they're gamers"

Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has laid out a clear message for developers who treat player feedback as design gospel. He says the gaming community is great at spotting bugs, glitches, and other issues, but not so great at fixing them. That’s because gamers are “not developers.”

In a new video on his YouTube channel titled “Why ‘Listening to the Community’ Is Bad Advice,” Darrah, who spent over two decades at BioWare working on titles like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Baldur’s Gate, shared his take on community feedback. He addressed developers directly, saying feedback from gamers should be treated as raw data rather than a mapped-out blueprint.

In clear, cold terms, he said, “They’re not developers, they’re gamers.” It’s a long-held view that has been circulating in developer circles in recent months. Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson also made a nearly identical video on the same topic. He supported his stance with a line from Magic: The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater: “Your audience is good at recognizing problems but bad at solving them.”

Community feedback should be one of, but not the only thing that developers should consider?

These opinions come from very different corners of the industry, but they arrive at the same conclusion. Darrah was careful to note that this isn’t an excuse to completely tune out gamers. According to Darrah, player feedback is invaluable for flagging bugs, balance issues, and other problems long before a QA team catches them. 

At the end of the day, players generate more data points than any QA team or test group can achieve. However, the trouble starts when studios think, “Players are upset, so let’s build exactly what they asked for,” without giving community feedback a second thought.

Darrah’s proposed fix for the player feedback issue isn’t to ignore the community, but to expand the process by pairing player feedback with playtesting, telemetry, and sales data from comparable games to get a clearer idea of what’s genuinely going wrong.

Developers shouldn’t simply cave to the loudest voices on platforms like gaming subreddits. Even then, Darrah says developers should be able to tune out popular takes or suggestions from the gaming community when they clash with the game’s core vision.