New online competetive turn-based tactical customizable strategy game!

So I can't say specifically why individual products do that, but, among the potential reasons:

• liability (companies have been sued before for speech used inside their games)
• accessibility (many platforms, particularly consoles, simply don't have an easy way to input text for most users)
• multi-platform consistency (related to accessibility, most products want to have a similar feature set across all platforms, and for the UI design to reflect that)
• customer service overhead (chat always leads to a bunch of CS tickets about harassment an other stuff... and for larger games, this could be a huge chunk of stuff to deal with on a daily basis)
• retention (some people in the industry argue that negative chat impacts retention negatively more than having chat improves retention, this is hotly debated)
• cost (adding chat is a non-zero cost proposition, especially if that chat needs to function across multiple platforms due to other needs)

As far as I know, "protecting people" is never high on that list (and sometimes not at all), it's just what you say in PR-land - it's usually more about the bottom line.

 

I wouldn't say so. Think about it from the business' point of view.

Liability is the company covering their own ass and not wanting to deal lawsuits because someone said something stupid in their game about nazis or whatever. So the option is "Have Chat and deal with potential lawsuits" or "Don't have chat and don't worry about it."

Customer Service is a bottom-line type of thing - those tickets don't process themselves. So the options are: "Have chat and hire 2 more CS guys" or "Don't have chat and save some money."

Negative Chat is a retention thing - which again, affects bottom line. If you believe that having chat (or not having chat) affects retention, it becomes part of the discussion. Here, the debate is, "We should have chat because people are more likely to play longer by building a community, etc." vs "We shouldn't have chat because toxic people drives player away."

In none of those cases is the primary motivator "protecting players" it's "protecting the business."

 

I am not saying I have never heard protecting the players as a reason AT ALL, but it's usually a footnote or an afterthought, if it is actually mentioned at all, when discussing these sort of things.

 

As I said, it's not about protecting players. It's about the issues and intents I listed.

 

There are actually scenarios where communication is ADDED because it helps the bottom line.

For example, there was a Poker game I worked on that added player taunts (added your face/profile image and a custom message) when you knocked someone out of a table.

This increased the % of people that would "buy back" significantly and was considered a huge success.

 

I mean, I could say "I want to destroy Earth because I am a bloodthirsty maniac." You could say "Oh, well, you are protecting the rest of the universe from the humans who are screwing up their own planet."

Maybe it's true that's an INDIRECT effect... but it's not why I want to do it.

In any case, the point is, when discussing whether to have chat/communication options, I've rarely heard "protect players" as a major reason for doing it. Does not having chat ACTUALLY protect players? Sure, I think you can argue that it does, but that's not the GOAL of not having chat.

So rather than "taking away communication to protect us from each other" as you suggested, the question developers are answering is "Is it worth ADDING communication? Considering the cost of doing so and the BS that comes with it?"

Which, to me, is a fundamentally different proposition.

I will agree with you that the trend is towards NO to that question, I just disagree on why they do it.

 

Ok, you keep thinking they are not adding chat to protect players and despise it.

I know the truth of why they add or do not add chat - protecting players has little to do with it.