"Woke" game developers have forgotten that "the client is always right"

The old adage, used in all kinds of businesses dealing with customers, "the client is always right", is often misunderstood.

Rather obviously clients can be wrong, incorrect, mistaken or even just lying. The adage is not meant to say "always believe the clients, no matter what they say."

What it is saying is that, in general, and whenever possible, you should deal with clients in such a way that they don't feel like they are in the wrong and being contradicted and corrected. In other words, a form of diplomacy: Don't be rude to a client, whenever possible don't contradict a client in a blunt manner. Instead, be tactful, approach the situation in a diplomatic manner. Soften the blow, so to speak. Don't directly say "you are wrong", or "that's not possible", or "that's incorrect". Instead, make the clients feel like what they are saying makes sense, and then negotiate with the client to veer the discussion towards a solution that actually works or is feasible or available. If what the thing the client is asking is indeed completely impossible, that might be mentioned in the discussion, but as non-bluntly as possible.

If at all possible, avoid making the client feel like a fool! Even if what the client wanted is completely idiotic, never, ever express that! Diplomacy! Even if you need to lie, make the client feel like it was reasonable, just simply not feasible, and always suggest an actually feasible alternative. Outright insulting a client (or making the client feel insulted) is the last thing you want to do!

Being able to do this without the client noticing that you are just trying to be polite can be difficult, but that's the art of customer service, dealing with clients. Experts at this will make clients feel smart, intelligent and sensible, even when they are being completely idiotic.

(Note that this is not related to situations where eg. the client asks for a particular product, and said product is unavailable eg. because of being sold out or just not sold at all there, in which case it's of course completely valid to directly tell the client that the product is not available and why, and perhaps suggest an alternative. In this case the client isn't making a claim or demand, simply asking for a particular product.)

In the modern western world, more and more video game developer companies have become "woke", and they have swallowed this entire narrative that "gamers" are some kind of undesirable microscopic minority of their clients who they don't need to care about. And, with it, more and more of these companies have forgotten, or more likely never even gotten the memo of, what it means that "the client is always right". In other words, the art of diplomacy towards your clients, towards your customerbase.

Developer after developer, representative after representative, employee after employee, of these game studios, are going out there in social media, blogs and video sharing websites, deriding and insulting the "gamers", as if indeed they were just a microscopic minority of the people who actually buy their games.

These developers are just being utterly stupid. Even if these "gamers" they are talking about were indeed a minority of their customers, that still doesn't entitle them to insult them, deride them, treat them like garbage. They just cannot comprehend proper diplomacy and customer service.

And to make it even worse, these stupid "woke" developers going into these rants are most often, if not always, the ones who are in the wrong. They are not just pointing out to their customers how the customers themselves are wrong, in a completely non-diplomatic manner, they are actually the ones usually in the wrong themselves. It's like a developer telling a customer "that's incorrect, you are wrong", when it's the developer himself who's actually mistaken and the client is genuinely correct.

It's like a double whammy.