Frustrated 7 Days to Die Players Leave Negative Reviews After Unanswered Town Hall Questions

A recent 7 Days to Die stream for the upcoming 2.0 update has sparked controversy after fans felt that the developers weren’t adequately addressing their feedback to improve the game. Top subreddit posts have become a deluge of negative comments toward the stream, and disgruntled fans have taken to review bombing the game on Steam in protest of the game’s direction. Just how did we arrive at this point, and what did the developers do to cause such a response?

The lead-up to the 2.0 update has been a boiling point for some fans, who have been frustrated with the state of 7 Days to Die for quite some time. Initially released in 2013 in Early Access, the game has undergone several changes over the years, including the removal, rework, or replacement of beloved features that has fomented dislike among the player base. A pattern of removing more complicated mechanics in service of streamlining the game for newer players and a mainstream audience has continued to rub long-time fans the wrong way.

In 2024, the game received its “1.0” release after over a decade of Early Access that improved the graphics and introduced new content. However, fan reception to 1.0 was mixed due to performance issues and new game mechanics that were divisive among fans.

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As the game begins to roll out its next significant update, this 2.0 “Town Hall” livestream held on Friday was intended to be an opportunity for the developers to address concerns with disgruntled fans and demonstrate that they were taking feedback into account. As part of this livestream, questions from fans were supposed to be read aloud and openly answered by the team.

However, fans felt that the developers were intentionally ignoring critical questions and that some comments made were out of touch, given the issues that players have with the game. Some players were left with the impression that Richard Huenink, co-founder of game developer The Fun Pimps, was blaming the community for delays in game development because of the amount of feedback they were receiving.

“Just so you know, when we’re reacting to feedback and we’re changing our production plan, we are effectively delaying bandits, “said Huenick in the livestream. “So when you request a lot of stuff and you come in in numbers and you ask for it, and we say ‘alright we’re listening, we’re going to do this,’ that costs us time.”

The town hall stream was met with a very poor reception from many in the 7 Days to Die player base, who expressed their frustrations on the official forums, Reddit, and in Steam reviews. Recent Steam reviews for the game have an average score of 58%, and Steam review charts reveal some of the highest concentration of low review scores in the game’s history on the platform.

“Last night’s stream was a [painful] indicator to just how out of touch the developers have become with 7DTD,” said a top-upvoted post on the game’s subreddit by Reddit user TheOrangeMadness. “Richard Huenink’s closing remark on blaming the community for delays while completely ignoring the real issues players have voiced for years was extremely in poor taste.”

During the stream, the developers asserted that questions were coming in too fast to answer, which critical fans took as a sign they were being intentionally ignored.

“A Town Hall involves leaders receiving and answering questions from their audience and is generally viewed as an effort to make the audience included and heard,” wrote Reddit user Compettitive-Heron-21. “The fact that they couldn’t figure out a way to read any audience questions for a TOWN HALL is a shining neon sign saying “WE’RE CALLING THIS A TOWN HALL SO YOU FEEL HEARD BUT YALLS OPINION STILL AINT S–T TO US.’”

What are your thoughts on the controversy? Did the town hall stream miss the mark for what you were expecting from the game? Are fans overreacting with their online criticism of the developers?