and elect another". We must be at Marx's second repetition of history as farce, as the last US election has led to widespread criticism of the electorate by the left. If the people don't vote Democrat, then the people must be wrong. But that sort of criticism isn't limited to politics. It is also very present in gaming.

For example a developer of the failed first-person shooter Concord called his customers "a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it". It has become increasingly common for triple A games to have an embargo on content creators, and even on user reviews, so that on launch day only glowing reviews from friendly press is available. Compare the following two recent role-playing games: Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an 82 critics score on Metacritic, but only a 38 on customer reviews; Drova - Forsaken Kin has as 79 critics score, but a 89 on customer reviews. Developers always claim bad customer reviews are from "trolls" or "haters", but the big gaps between critics reviews and customer reviews happen exclusively for games with huge marketing budgets. On Veilguard, IGN bridged the gap by first releasing a glowing 9 out of 10 review, and then posting a second article, not marked as a review and with no review score, that listed everything they thought was wrong with the game and wasn't mentioned in the "review". Sales numbers tend to reflect customer review scores, not because the "trolls and haters" have an outsized influence, but because that is how good a game really is.

I think what we are seeing here, both in politics and gaming, is an elite that created their own echo chamber bubble with the help of the internet. When an election or game release forces the issue out of the bubble and into the general population, the reception comes as a surprise, as the bubble previously protected the elite from any real feedback. The current trend on left-leaning social media communities is cancelling the part of their families who voted Republican for Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday celebrations. People want back into their comfortable bubble, where everybody agrees with them. Why would Democrats want to engage with the wider population, listen to what people really thought about the previous administration, and spend the next 4 years improving their program to be more attractive next time, when instead they could just retreat for 4 years into their echo chambers and mutually stroke their moral superiority? Why would game developers want to go through the hassle of open beta testing and listening to actual player feedback, when it is so much more comfortable to listen only to the handful of "games journalists" that they paid to tell them how great they are?

The electorate is never wrong. The customer is never wrong. Dear Elite: If your intimate conviction that your political program is superior, that your game is superior, doesn't survive the contact with reality when stepping out of the bubble, you can't change reality. You don't get to dissolve the electorate or customer base. You should have stepped out of your bubble earlier, and seeked honest feedback, to change your product before it was too late.