Developers VS The People

In the world of video games, you have the developer, the publisher, and the consumers. The publisher is just the middle man, the company that gets the game to stores usually. It's the developer and consumer that really matter. In the early days, developers would make a game, and it would either make them, or break them. If people didn't like the game, it wasn't bought, it was forgotten about, and if the company couldn't try again, so be it. Today, most developers are huge, and make one game then go on to the next. Consumers care a lot more as well, most games usually becoming franchises these days. Developers like doing things their way, with very few of them getting any input from the public except through playtesting.
It's another hot topic for video games; does the devloper know more than the public, or vice versa? Who should have the say? In my opinion, developers need to defer to public more, and they need to make sure it's a broad audience. Lots of games have been ruined by a single mechanic that could been fixed if they had at least playtested, or better yet asked lots of people by posting it online. The good news is that more developers are using the public as another tool when making games. Woohoo!