Randy Pitchford, president and CEO of Gearbox Software, believes that even hatred from gamers is a sign that you have accomplished something as a developer.
As far as he is concerned, there are two obvious ways to approach prolonged and aggressive criticism: feel like Gearbox has screwed up, or that the complaining player is wrong. The studio boss chooses to view it a different way.
We moved that person, we touched that person,” he said. Even if a person hates it that much, you’ve affected them. That’s why we fight [to develop our games]: we wish to affect people. Hopefully, we’re going to create happiness, but really we want to create emotion.”
He later said that developers "profit for failure, more so than success" since troubled games are the ones that teach studios the most about future projects and encourage them to try harder in future.
Head over to Develop for more details.