Pro tip:

Don't immerse yourself in any community because you love the thing.

Love the community. Love the thing. Love them separately.

I LOVE melodic death metal and progressive death metal. I don't wanna meet other metal fans. At all. I want to meet people who like what I like but not because what we both like belongs to some more amorphous superset.

You can love Tupac and hate hip hop. You can love Opeth, and hate Opeth, and still love Mikael akerfeldt, and still kinda hate him. You can love snowboarding, and think the culture is cringe.

Don't let the people who love the things you love make you feel differently about the things you love, unless it's those people you love or something? Idk. Crowds of people are dumb as fuck. Ignore them.

Most of what you're describing is just review bias. Reviews are usually only left by people who either had a very positive or a very negative experience. Strong opinions are also more memorable and tend to get more attention.

The Callisto Protocol that you played now is not how it originally released. It was patched and tweaked a lot.

Also the gameplay is flawed. See the combat system with more than one enemy and it gets wonky. One of the changes was exactly to make enemies less aggressive as before they would often gang up on you and lead to frustrating deaths.

I like The Callisto Protocol a great deal as well, but it is a game flawed in what matters most: the gameplay.

I don't think the statements you cite are destructive or toxic. They're just negative reviews. If you truly don't care what people say then they shouldn't matter to you.

As for the charge that a game is generic and you enjoyed it, well think about it. A game reviewer has to play hundreds of games a year. They're constantly playing games. If a game is like other games they've played it'll be boring for them. You on the other hand as a player probably don't play nearly as many games. So it's less likely that a game is like other games you've played. Even if it's similar to other games you probably haven't played them so to you it's new.

There's nothing wrong with people having different opinions about games and expressing them in their own language no matter how mean it may sound to you as a fan. If you had fun with it, great.

I'm a game dev and have been a gamer for all of my 35 years on this earth.

The real issue is anonymity. People are not themselves online, especially not in game (not that I advocate for less anonymity). It's completely out of your control and best not to expect too much of it. Have your own fun.

Like that idiot who ripped out the Banksy stop sign an hour after it was revealed. We just can't have nice things, it's always been this way and always will. Poverty, injustice, discrimination, group dynamics, mental health etc.. all contribute to the mix.

I highly recommend a documentarish thing on YouTube from Dan Olson called : Why it's rude to suck at Warcraft. Very relevant to your question I think.

Just because someone doesn’t like something doesn’t mean they’re toxic, but for whatever reason people take differences in tastes or opinion as personal attacks and discussions often turn toxic.

I think part of it is a lot of discussions on games are between literal children or man-children who don’t have a lot of emotional maturity yet, and so it leads to a lot a fanboyism and flame wars.

I’d love to give you my opinion on Callisto protocol but my back log is so big I might never get to it.

I recently finished The Callisto Protocol and in my opinion it’s a great game but I remember people saying that “The game was so bad that they (Krafton) had to give it away (PS Plus) for someone to play it”.

It's important to keep in mind that the internet is big.

Before the internet, we could not hear the opinions of people except the ones closest around us plus whatever got exposed through the news. Which in turn is vetted and filtered, partially to remove extreme choice of words and professionalize it.

However now everyone is on the internet, and there's a whole lot of humans around ([citation needed], obvs 😅). It's not difficult to find a handful that would review Callisto Protocol in a toxic manner. It's not difficult to find an ex-president that condones an insurrection while trying to steal federal secret documents, either. Given enough people to look at, you will always be able to find a few that do X or think Y. Now if you then again filter your view down to a myopic but selective enough choice, you will be able to include those people, making the context seem very extreme.

Ask yourself this: Of the people in your immediate IRL surroundings, how many have strong negative feelings about Callisto Protocol? (I bet most don't have any opinion, and most don't even game?) But if you select just people who played it, who had opinions on it, and then strong enough ones to write a review, of course you'll find a lot of toxic opinions.

(edit)
And of course in this case it adds that the Callisto Protocol is genuinely bad, and just about everyone agrees. That doesn't mean people won't enjoy it (as you do), but anyone already negatively inclined will feel far more able to post aggressive words about it, fearing retaliation less.

As an add-on to OP, is it just my confirmation bias or are competitive games a trove for alt-righters? Never seen so many Trump supporters except in CSGO and rocket league...

Competitive nature is rarely appropriate

In my experience, its the competitive games that are the most toxic. Coop games require people to work together which inherantly punishes toxic behavior. And this carries over to the community that forms around the game. i.e the people that tend to remain interested in a game enough to be part of the general community are going to be more accepting of the social environment of the game. Toxicity in the game drives away players that arent toxic or at least accepting of it. So less goxic players tend to have less of an influence in those gaming communities. And toxic players like that tend to be louder and are easier to notice in the broader gaming community

For some people it gives them a sense of superiority to be able to look down on something that somebody else likes. Or everyone just has different opinions and you’re just more likely to read opinions from the people that felt something negative about the game. If somebody thought it was ok or they mildly liked it, they’re probably not going to care enough to say anything about it. As a Star Wars fan, you’ll see nothing but people ripping apart every new Star Wars series, and it’s the fans that are tearing if down the most (to be fair though, Disney makes it easy by being so lazy).

Unfortunately this is on par with "what is the meaning of life?"

Dozens of reasons I'm sure, but for me I've just noticed people in general have become much more cynical combined with needing instant perfect satisfaction.

A game cannot be simply "okay" anymore. It's either masterpiece or garbage. If a game can't beat RDR2 then it's immediately worthless.

One I keep getting downvoted to hell here about is Starfield. Constantly downvoted because I had the gall to say it's an okay game, that it's perfectly fine, that it runs okay, and I had fun playing it. I never said it was a great game, never said it was without flaws, but just the fact that I didn't throw it in the trash made commenters come out of the wordwork and rip my comments to shreds.

I don't know where this came from. Gamers have always been negative, but the last 5-10 years it's just gotten so much worse. Frankly I'm surprised developers have any passion for it at all anymore. They release a project they spent 5 years on, put their time, effort, and energy into, and there's about a 1% chance that people will like it and a 99% chance that they're going to be doxxed.

In the end, I've stopped watching reviews. I've stopped listening to the internet for what they like. I choose my own way. I buy games that look fun and play them, and you know what? It's been a blast.

Fat incel 40+ yo basement dwellers are unlikely to be positive people.

Gaming culture is more toxic. It's because of GamerGate.

GamerGate was an online harassment campaign, conspiracy theory, and lie that the entire gaming industry was trying to ruin games by pandering to "SJWs". Women, queer people, minorities, and the disabled were being shoehorned into games as "forced diversity" in order to brainwash gamers into leftest politics. Worst of all, white cis hetero men were being forced out of the gaming space that always belonged to them.

Obviously, the solution to this dastardly plot was to dox, harass, and swat people declared, on the flimsiest evidence, to be behind this plot. Anyway, this was very successful and the tactics, bigotry, and mentality has so infiltrated online gaming spaces, most of the people being toxic today learned that behavior second or third hand from those who actually participated in Gamergate.

IDK if this was coordinated, or spontaneous, but the "alt-right" was very active a this time trying to meme Trump into the white house. Even skeptic spaces that are left wing about almost everything else became cesspits of Islamophobia.

So I enjoy playing Spiral Knights. Since right after the game launched in 2011 there were always a significant amount of players around, claiming it was "dead" without further specifying what that meant.

Spiral Knights still gets new players every day and even though it's free to play, some people even spend large sums on it to gample for cosmetics or buy rare items from other players.

I have come to the conclusion that some people just have an insane definition of "alive"

You see it across all kinds of media; whether it's a song you like, or a game, or a film, or a TV show... If you dare to say online you're a fan, someone will swiftly be along to inform you that your opinion is wrong, your show is bad, your taste is bad, and you should feel bad

I've started to give way less of a fuck about comments like that. Some people are very sad / small, and can only make themselves feel less so for a brief moment by trying to ruin the enjoyment of others. It's OK not to like things, there's plenty of things I don't like 😁 but it's fine to me if other people like those things, different strokes for different folks.