To What Extent Do Developers Tolerate Toxicity in Video Game Projects in OSS

Open-source software (OSS) projects thrive on voluntary collaboration. Such collaboration typically occurs through public interactions such as issue reports, pull requests, discussion comments, and code reviews. While these interactions are essential for coordination, they can also incubate toxic communication. Although toxicity in OSS communities has been widely documented, we still lack a clear understanding of its temporal evolution and its specific impact on developer retention, particularly within the unique, cross-disciplinary ecosystems of open-source game development.

In this paper, we present the first longitudinal analysis of toxicity across 99 GitHub-based game development projects. In particular, we use survival analysis to examine the incubation period of toxicity and subsequent developer dropout following targeted toxic exposure. Our project-level Kaplan–Meier analysis reveals that high-activity projects (those with 24+ pull requests per month) experience an accelerated timeline for toxicity, with 65.63% encountering their first toxic interaction within a year. At the developer level, we observe that a substantial portion of contributors disengage shortly after their first targeted exposure to toxicity, with 11.8% dropping out immediately and 23.3% within 30 days. A Cox proportional hazards model further indicates that developers with longer tenure and greater prior contribution history are slightly less likely to disengage after such exposure, whereas contributors with less experience in the project are more likely to leave following targeted toxicity. Our findings highlight the importance of early moderation practices, clear contribution guidelines, and proactive support for newcomers to sustain healthy collaboration in open-source game development communities.