Developer Appreciation Week

The Blaugust weekly structured format post is “Developer Appreciation Week” and I already made a post about that topic and mentioned an upcoming rant.
A big problem in the game industry is working too much and not being paid enough (and gamers being idiots), so I’ve decided very early on that I don’t want to work in games. I wish the industry was better for the people working there and I’m not upset if a game comes a year late, I’d prefer that to the poor souls working 80h weeks. But sure, I could do more – and maybe buy more games full price at launch, but if you scroll past my posts over the last few years you will notice I’m not really playing many games. I’d go as far as to say that I’m not the target demographic. I play a few games heavily, I even did that before MMOs were a thing. I’m also happy to pay a monthly subscription – but that’s a bit winner-takes-it-all, I’m then not buying other games for a while.
So I’d really appreciate if if game companies of a certain size would pay their developers enough money and most importantly stop the soul crushing crunch time.
This customer who buys your games (sample size: 1) usually doesn’t mind if anything gets delayed, as long as you keep the status quo of the game running. And if it’s not coming out yet.. maybe you shouldn’t have announced it a year early? How about announcing it and then capturing the hype from announcement until launch a few months later. Why would I care how I felt about your game last year? For indies it’s a bit different. If they’re a single person or duo or three people who do kind of bootstrap a startup as equals (and not abuse their employees)… sure that’s hard, but they chose this. They have all my support to do what they love, they just don’t get to whine about the world being a tough place. Feel free to see me as not eligible to comment if I may bot buy your game – but if I like it, I may buy it, but I’m not a games hoarder, I don’t even buy all the games I’m instantly excited about.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my twenty-first post.

The Blaugust weekly structured format post is “Developer Appreciation Week” and I do remember when Belghast first posted on that topic, years ago. And I applaud him for bringing that topic up.
That said, I drafted up a mega-rant on that topic yesterday, but I need to refine it, so here’s a list of things I really appreciate:

• configurable key binding – I grew up with WASD and it just works[tm]
• fullscreen windowed mode – I have Discord and IRC and whatever open. I like your game, but I’m really sorry, but I cannot use it exclusively, I must alt-tab.
• for MMOs, an API like Blizzard’s battle.net API/Armory. I wanted to launch something with a lot of features like the well-known WoW sites for SWTOR back at launch, had a domain and everything – but they never let me access my characters’ data 🙁 Ragnarok Online’s euRO server also did this, it was glorious.
• fix bugs instead of creating new content. I might be in the minority here, but I know how hard some bugs are to find, reproduce, and fix. You won’t hear me complaining about lack of new stuff in patch notes, but you’ll definitely hear me cheering if a bug I hit was fixed

Then again, these things are kinda the norm, so am I just ranting when they’re missing because I’m expecting them? OK, the first two are kinda standard but the third one is so rare I’d be really grateful!
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my sixteenth post.