Can ditching DEI save the failing video game industry?

Gamergate is back.

At the very least, that's how Wired Magazine characterizes the current backlash against the video game industry's DEI. Don't worry about backlash happening all over the culture. The game has a special name.

Concord's failure may be historical, but it is far from an isolated case. It is the industry standard for awakened game to fail.

What do people in this “online hate group” do? According to Wiredthey express their preference for the game “no minority or strange characters, [with] The fictional women they find attractive, and… [without] The political agenda of the left. ”

Like the original Gamergate from 10 years ago.

in front

I'm old enough to remember my original Gamergate. In fact, I was part of it – I didn't know that at the time. In the early 2010s, there was nothing political about video games. What's important was probably not the ideology expressed, but the experiences the game created.

Not to mention that…until the left appears.

Suddenly, the left seemed everywhere, like a collaborative effort to win the industry. People like Anita Sarkeesian, Laura Kate Dale and others plunged the video games into the public spotlight, denounced them as “problematic.”

Game sites such as Kotaku and Polygon have been amplified by publicly interested publications like The Guardian – has begun calling the industry the following “Too white and too male.” The game had to be more “various” and “LGBTQ-friendly.”

Of course, this was the latest aspect of the longstanding culture war that had been raging in Hollywood and academia for many years. But no one was there to tell me that. I was in high school and all I knew was that there were annoying people who called me sexist, racist and all the slurs in the book.

And then I thought of it I'll do it It's left unattended – in the end. After all, these people were obviously crazy extremists – certainly common sense would win in the end. Plus, did the gaming company realize that no one wanted these changes? Did they not realize they were hurting their revenue? I wake up and go to break…Is that so?

I found my optimism to be a bit premature.

The fake revolution

The good news is that people complaining about “Gamergate 2.0” don't seem as energetic as they were a decade ago. Maybe it's because it's difficult to play a oppressed minority.

Thanks to Doge, we are beginning to see the extent to which “hobbies” have been supported by the US government.

Now we can begin answering questions that have baffled us at least since the fiasco that was Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Was the majority of game studios willing to casually torch all the IPs they own? Why was the production of all films more than they were happy to burn decades of goodwill and franchise investment? What reasons did our entire culture self-inhal?

The left is essentially because it is a huge top-down sponsorship network with billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars (our dollars) in funding.

Despite Doge's tireless efforts, I don't think he's thinking about the full range of all. They come out so fast, and the headlines are so crazy that even satirical publications like Onion and Babylon Bee look overwhelmed.

And they made us pay for it.

What was that for?

I'm not saying that everything that happened was the result of USAID – no, of course. But what I'm saying is that billions have explicitly spent money on left-wing causes. And we cannot overestimate the incredible scale of these networks.

Oddly, I find myself looking back at the abuse that is rampaging, not anger, but melancholy. What was that for? I've been fighting this fight for years so I think I'm a bit burned out. When we hear the next rage, the next scandal, it's hard to gather much more energy than we shrugged. Sometimes I ask X, “What did you do to the left?”

As a zoomer in his mid-20s, he rolls his eyes. I have heard this story thousands of times before, but at a time worse than the last. The left did that that? Of course that was the case. And I wait for the next scandal.

But I continue to come back to this question: what was it for?

Awakened case

As awakened activists were screaming for inclusion and diversity, they had two arguments about why we should support their cause.

The first was that the mind was a moral thing to do. It was the wise politics of a man “on the right side of history.” A good, decent individual will logically support diversity, inclusion and left-wing ideology. Of course, we should awaken entertainment!

The second argument is something that captures my nerves more. This means that video games should wake up more, as video games make video games. Better.

We were going to get a more immersive, more mechanically complex game, a new generation of entertainment that appeals to everyone. We were going to get the story on a deeper, more persuasive theme. We were going to make the hero's new wave to fall in love.

And we were going to improve the old games by updating them to modern sensibilities. As long as we became more liberal, the future was brighter. Or guaranteed by all activists whining about the dangers of racism and prejudice.

So, how did you do that?

Look no further than the recent examples of Mega-Flop Concord.

Triple A Disaster

Concord, a multiplayer, multiplayer, first-person shooter inspired by “Guardians of the Galaxy,” was what the industry knows as a “Triple A” game.

Firewalk Studios has developed Concord for over eight years. some Conflict The game reported a $400 million budget, but it's clear that it's highly funded. It was intended to be a blockbuster, establishing a universe that will remain sequels and spinoffs for the next few years.

It was also a perfect example of a “new” era imposed by leftists in the game. It wasn't just awakening It hurts Awakened – from intentionally unattractive character designs (including the scar option for “top surgery”) to inspiring pronoun selection.

It was a very bad thing that a reasonable studio executive should have known that the project would fail at first glance.

I don't want to put all my responsibility in nostalgia. Concord's game design was bad enough without a progressive touch, and the market for hero shooters was oversaturated.

Still, it says that so many people hated the game, even before they played it. On release date, the game, which cost hundreds of millions of people, had less than 700 players.

For comparison, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was a game developed on a budget of $40 million and had 256,000 concurrent players.

Concord's failure may be historical, but it is far from an isolated case. It is the industry standard for awakened game to fail. Some major examples can be cited from above the head: Dragon Age: Bailguard, Mass Effects: Andromeda, Saints Row, Starfield, Star Wars Outlaw, Fordork, Dustborn, Wolfenstein II, etc.

Now I'm not claiming that these games have failed purely because of their politics. What I'm saying is that political invasion is one of the main reasons why the video game industry is like that.Facing the collapse of the Titanic.

Broken

In 2023 alone, 10,000 developers were fired, making 2024 even worse. I honestly followed the number of studio shutdowns. It appears that the offensive DEI initiative bill is due to be hired for diversity rather than for talent and abilities.

Not only are the games awakened more than before, but they are also the people who make them. We will try to look at photos of famous game studios for 20 years and compare them to the present. You will notice some obvious differences.