The more people play a game, the higher the chance of someone who cares playing the game and then arguing about it on the internet.

If 1% of players care, you're gonna have 5000 people who care enough to post about it out of 5000000 players of a certain game. If only 50000 people know about the game, only 50 people will care enough to post online about it, so naturally you're gonna have a harder time finding those guys.

With enough players, even the smallest percentage of "people who care" are going to seem like a smurfton of people if they all gather on the same online message boards, but they're still really just a small minority.