Try to remember there's a distinction between reasoned debate, like what you and I are doing right now, and trolling. Which I'm sure we could both switch to if we felt like it.

Criticism, for it to be useful, does have certain delivery requirements. The critic, in order to not be shit, has a certain responsibility to their criticism.

I don't think the bar is that high or that a majority of the negative discussion falls under bullying. It's a lot of people disappointed in a game and voicing their frustration.

Saying a game sucks and has no redeeming qualities and encouraging them to get a refund when they ask for any kind of tech support for it on Reddit is kind of unoriginal and lazy but I don't think that classifies as bullying.

For example this is from Reddit about someone liking the game. You get good responses like this

Subjectively or objectively?

Objectively it’s far from what they’ve promised, full of bugs and hardly optimized.

It’s also a promising platform that could evolve into an objectively amazing game somewhere down the road.

If you — subjectively — enjoy it in its current state that’s great!

But you do get some less constructive comments like

I bought CS2 and it's utter shit.

But now I feel like a sucker to open CS1 again.

End result: I gave up on Cities Skyline completely. May fall out of habit of playing it at all.

CS2 could, but not certainly, be the death of the franchise if more people act like me

And

I could name a hundred things off the top of my head that could be better in this game. I still have a hundred hours though

Even sorting by controversial on Reddit it's really not that bad. It sounds like there are some posts being removed but a majority of it is people voicing their frustration with modding support taking so long to implement and the game feeling like it's lacking in some department.

Does it have to go full gamergate for you think its a problematic situation or something?

I feel like were going in circles here. I already acknowledged that there are going to be people that take it to the extreme and that's wrong but it's a very percentage of people.

Now, gamers are a tough bunch. If a community is losing community, I think we can make some inferences about whats going on, and it's probably not a bunch of well-reasoned and nuanced debate.

I disagree. You see communities around games slow down all the time when new games, updates, and DLC steal the spotlight. A lot of the time you just need to wait for things to shift in a different direction. In the meantime people are going to sporadically talk about how they feel about the game and debate updates that come out.