Are game companies talking to us, or at us?

There is a genre of post that every big studio has learned to write. It has a header image. It has the words "we hear you." It has three bullet points about "ongoing conversations." It contains no date, no number, and no promise anybody could ever be held to.

A roadmap with no dates on it is not a roadmap. It's a mood board. The quarters get replaced with "soon" and "later," the boxes get replaced with vibes, and eleven months later the same four items are still floating in the same fog.

The tell is what happens when a promise slips. A studio that is actually talking to you says the thing slipped, says why, and gives you a new date. A studio that is talking at you posts a longer version of the last post.

None of this is a moral failing on the part of the community manager, who is usually one underpaid person standing between a furious forum and a legal department that will not let them say a single specific word.

But the result is the same either way. You end up reading tea leaves. And a hobby where you have to read tea leaves to find out whether the thing you bought will ever be finished is not a hobby, it's a pending court case.