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Gamergate 2
A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.
Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.
This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned
This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
What are your thoughts?
Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)
I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.
In reality, I think the touchpoint really comes down to 3 games, all of which did quite poorly, objectively. Saint's Row, Forsaken and Suicide Squad. I think 2 had technical issues (I thought the demo for Forsaken was decent), but I think all three, story wise, had issues in that they just came across as bad, tone-wise. I think that certain cultural tone simply doesn't have the wide appeal that the bigwigs think it has. Now, I think Suicide Squad the issues were more with the gameplay than the story, (people didn't want a shoot the purple glowing button live service game) but still. I do think it's a problem.
My own personal viewpoint is that it's larger than one consulting firm. And considering that Alan Wake 2, IMO was actually pretty good, and SBI DID consult on that, I do think the problem is somewhere else. Myself? I've given up on North American AAA. And yeah, Forsaken was Japanese developed, but they WANTED to be a North American game in so many ways.
I do think there's something wrong in the NA AAA space, and I do think the explosion of Progressive politics plays a role, but it's not a direct one, other than the moral license issues. I think it's just a narrow culture, much more narrow than it thinks it is, and that's the problem. Outside of NA, and I disagree, GTA 6 I think will probably be fine if it's still rooted in the nascent anti-Americanism, I think around the rest of the world, even Left/Progressive coded games are fine.
I think part of the problem is simply a failure to optimize for quality. An absence of merit and meritocracy. It's not required for wokeness to be an objectively negative property in games as long as it distracts from quality. If you had a substantial fraction of people obsessed with blue flowers to the point that they start hiring people to work on their game on the basis that they are fellow blue-flower enthusiasts rather than their programming and game design skill, that alone would decrease the quality of games (or productivity in pretty much any industry). If you insert a bunch of fanservice characters whose main appeal is that they wear blue flowers, and fail to make them appealing in other ways because the blue-flower-wearing takes care of that in the minds of the developers, then you end up with lackluster characters from the perspective of anyone who doesn't care about blue flowers. If all mainstream games all start to share similar plotlines of evil villains trying to poison all the blue flowers, or worse, dye them red (the horror!), people will get tired of it. Nobody cares about blue flowers, tell some good stories!
Any overly ideological creator that gets too self-absorbed in their own niche obsession will struggle to make good content that appeals to anyone who doesn't share their obsession because they get too many false-positives from self-masturbatory appeals to their own niche and stop optimizing for more objective quality once something meets their own distorted subjective view.
This is why any overly preachy content is cringe and lame even when it contains a message that I agree with. The fact that wokeness in many instances happens to be toxic and destructive is just the cherry on top. The ideological obsession is the majority of the problem.
I don't even think this requires actual ideology. Nepotism gets you to the same place. And there are people that would argue (including me) that a lot of these culture wars in gaming and the media are based around nepotism, and see identitarianism as a way to distract from this.
I know at my workplace, they're having to redo the diversity training because it put nepotism on the same level as other forms of discrimination and people did not like it.
I'm not sure you can disentangle that, as the majority of these cases are not biological nepotism, as in people hiring their siblings and cousins, but ideological nepotism: people hiring their friends and colleagues who think the same way that they do because they have a shared ideology. The ideology and the nepotism feed into one another. Without the ideology they wouldn't feel such hatred for outsiders that they would feel the need to discriminate against them. It's not simply self-interest because they're not (usually) hiring actual family members.
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that may be your (and game Journos) own bias, it looks like thought it is Remedy's fastest Selling Game (at least according to estimates), the last news about the topic is that it still didn't turn a profit.
Yeah. I thought it was pretty good. Not great 'tho.
I would have cut the budget on that thing significantly 'tho. And I don't mean that as a critique per se. Just that I think they way overestimated the interest in such a game. Just to be clear, I think Control (their previous game) is a much better game overall.
One of the big complaints about the modern trends in gaming is the disappearance of the "AA" game. That sort of middle-ground between budget/indie and AAA. I think Alan Wake 2 should have been an AA game.
I think that is more the realm of the Japanese and other Asian devs. Things for example like the recent Unicorn Overlord.
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