It’s a shame that large companies like EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don’t do more to fight against it, instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are barely surviving to fend this off.
Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.
This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.
I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar story in the games industry of not providing credit to individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest days of Atari.
Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.
https://endofaspecies.com/oped/the-harassment-of-game-develo...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/zoe13c/passionate_...
https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/video-games-developers-gd...
https://www.xfire.com/authorities-investigating-death-threat...
I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew fairly well which features of the game or which class they were responsible for. When I used to look at the replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints about their area of perceived responsibility.
I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put their head down and work on their stuff they're passionate about without having to also be public-facing. Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs constantly complain that some customers know that they are responsible for certain features of our product and email them directly rather than going through the proper support channels.
Your point about the games industry often struggling with providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the passion and work of one of their engineers (even though anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.
