They are like a factories that produce a product, yet make no arrangements to ship or deliver it. Rather, they let customers take delivery on their own, and do with it what they will. Simply put, most online game developers still believe that the game is the product. Far from seeing the importance of hosting the community, most would like to have as little to do with the community as possible. This is hardly a peculiar point of view.
Many people view the internet as a boiling chaos of faceless souls behaving in shrill and rude ways.
What online game developers fail to understand, however, is that the power of their medium is the ability to transform this anarchy into civilization. The developers, by the nature of the conflict their games offer, and the accommodations their games make for persistent groups, are responsible for the type and tone of the communities arising from their games. Now, tell me you re shocked that you now have to build obscenity filters, devise ever more elaborate hack checking schemes, field hundreds of complaints a day many of them in all caps email filled with misspellings and bad or absent grammar and ban accounts from your game, permanently, on a daily basis. Certainly you d have little chance for success creating a game called Field of Daisies, where players roam a plush landscape filled with nothing but flowers that magically regenerate as you pick them. There must be a motive, friction opposing that motive, and risk associated with satisfying it.