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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?
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
In my mind, the order of operations is:
That is the pattern I see across the NA AAA games industry. The games that are being made are so laden with vampiric “engagement drivers” (read: unfun tedious time wasters not central to the gameplay loop) and cash shop features that they were never going to be fun. They tack on DEI feelgoodery to provide the thinnest veneer of moral virtue over what is basically a $60-70 predatory phone app disguised as a game.
The focus on DEI is symptomatic of the ultra-safe corporate decision making, but not the cause of why games (and movies and comics) suck now. For example, a hypothetical Suicide Squad game with fighting fucktoy Harley Quinn and a soy-free Luthor and no other changes would have still been shit. Gamers would be complaining that it was a tragedy that Kevin Conroy’s name was associated with such a dreadful game, and Rocksteady would still be dead.
Instead, we’re going to have a media cycle talking about -ist/-phobic gamers, and the corporate types who killed Rocksteady will end up at another company and start poisoning that one too.
So basically Bungie Monogatari ;)
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Well, yes. It's a very clear indicator of priorities, isn't it? It's the difference between a group of passionate people making something they'd want to play, and a group of cynical and jaded 9-to-5ers ticking off the checkboxes their corporate overlords have foisted on them. As the industry has generated more and more money, more corporate vultures in suits who have never played a "vidjeo jame" in their lives have moved in to extract that money. They don't know what makes a good game, and frankly, they don't care; end of quarter reports are what matter, so do all the things our market research department says people want and that are popular now, and jam this monetisation system into it because our reports say that it improves revenue by 8%. And shove all the god damn anti-piracy measures you can in to stop people STEALING money from us! Oh, and remove that, and this, and can we make this character black and/or female to appease the DEI screechers? No it doesn't matter if those things fit the game or actively make it worse, just do your job and do as I say!
The best example of this to me comes all the way back in the 90s, actually, courtesy of Naughty Dog developing Crash Bandicoot. To hear Andy Gavin tell it;
Jason Rubin elaborates;
I cannot think of very many dev teams that would have the sheer balls to do such a thing today.
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Did they make the female models fat, or did they just stop doing sex doll caricatures?
I shouldn't care about this, this is not the kind of game I'd play, and I do know that such games aimed exclusively at guys are not worried about women, they're putting in sex dolls. But the whining irritates me when it boils down to "I can't wank to this image".
What games I play, I'm not thinking about "whoo, look at the crotch bulge on that beefcake, I'm gonna beat off". But male and female sexuality is different, and guys who play games about shooting stealing it go boom etc. want their sexy sex doll wallpaper as well. That's fine, but don't complain as if "women are supposed to look like anorexic stick insects with zeppelins for breasts" is the normal depiction of women.
Great, and now I'm whining. I should go back and finish my replay of Baldur's Gate 3 for the evil ending, then continue on with the second replay I started and see if I can get Wyll to get into Astarion's pants this time round 😈
Well, this is the previous "sex dolls" from PD2
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamespot.com%2Fa%2Fuploads%2Fscreen_kubrick%2F1179%2F11799911%2F2761522-clover.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=7f642c546f82c7b13b8e444b4f95b8d02cd6f7c6327e822a247849ea4d7b7355&ipo=images
Sounds to me like projection
To be mildly fair, Sydney did get a lot of porn made of her, but then again, that was mostly just literally one artist who just really liked Sydney.
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The former. It's kinda hilarious actually because these days, games use real life actors as a base for human models, and people have started to notice that the actresses that do the capture are more curvy and have better looking faces than the end result. Which means someone, at some point, had to make the thing more ugly than it really is, and have a reason to do so.
Another possible explanation for this is that most women (especially in shots that end up highly ranked on Google images, eg. photoshoots, awards ceremonies and so on) wear flattering clothes that accentuate their curves. Meanwhile, when scanned into the game (if the model is based on a scan) they're wearing a skintight wetsuit. With faces, a lot of it (honestly this is true at least for Horizon and ME: Andromeda) is scanning the actual face and then players comparing it to pictures of the model in makeup striking a specific pose (ie. mewing).
Your theory is that the pretty women in the google images for characters like M.J. in the recent Spiderman II or Alloy in the Horizon Forbidden West games are just fat with good fashion sense? How does that square with Stellar Blade?
Is Aloy fat? I don't play capeshit but as I recall MJ in the Spider-Man games was again an average looking redheaded woman, and certainly not fat.
from the first one to the second one, yeah, she got fat
EDIT.- Alternate link because the other one got mangled. Sorry that its to iFunny.
Your link is mangled and goes to a random /r/funny thread, seemingly due to some combination of trying to link an image hosted on Reddit and old.reddit.com.
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Speaking of, what do you think of BG3 female party members' looks? Am I the one who's crazy when I think the "they making em look like men for trans appeasement" crowd need to touch grass?
That crowd needs to touch grass. I would say that I don't personally find any of the female party members attractive (Shadowheart comes close but her haircut is so damn ugly), but that's just personal preference. I certainly don't think they look like men.
I find Lae'zel to be the most attractive woman in the history of videogames, but that may be down to personality.
Lae'zel has that wonderful teef-ling bit that is probably the most endearing character interaction in the whole game.
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I used to find Lae'zel the most grating woman in the history of videogames, but then I recruited Minthara. Can anybody tell me what is the drow attitude towards nudity? Does she feel humiliated when I don't return the clothes I looted from her in act one and she is forced to strut around the camp pussy out? I hope she does.
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I question your taste in women, lol (I know, taste is totally subjective). Lae'zel's entire personality is grumpy. Maybe if she got the sand out of her cloaca she would be more pleasant to have in the party. :/
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I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
They learned from the film industry. If you think the Ghostbusters reboot sucks, obviously that means you're a misogynist alt-right manbaby troll.
DEI is just the newest way to polish the turd.
I didn't watch the female Ghostbusters. I liked the general idea of a reboot and having them all gender-swapped wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but the clips I saw and the fawning coverage about Kate whosis turned me off. I didn't think they were funny (apart from Chris Hemsworth being game to parody his "all brawn no brains" image) or as good as the original. So I didn't bother watching it, because "ooh she licked the guns, so strong female sexy daring!" does nothing for me.
So "all-women Ghostbusters" didn't put me off, "these women as Ghostbusters" did.
I think often DEI is used as a shield, maybe the original movie/game/show didn't have a DEI agenda explicitly, but it just sucked, people complained, and rather than admit "okay we made a shit product", the creators then scrabble around for "uh, uh, they hate it because - woman character! black character! gay character! it's prejudice, not because we made a shit product!"
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That explanation doesn't work because in many cases "this game / book / movie / comic wasn't made for you, chud" comes way before it's anywhere close to finished.
It also makes no sense to blame it on unwillingness to spend money - never played Payday, but cheaper indie games do better numbers than this for a much lower budget, and if they wanted easy money for little investment, they'd resell the previous one with updated assets, and call it a sequel. The success of these artistic and semi-artistic projects generally isn't about the money in itself, it's about catching lighting in a bottle. You need a good team, that wants to put something out, and works well together. This is hard in the best of times, as several well-funded corporations found out upon being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen from them by a well functioning startup. But wokeness adds another layer of issues, it's hostility to meritocracy will result in losing key talent via "who needs this asshole, we'll just hire someone more agreeable", people being terrified of providing necessary negative feedback, and will attract the worst kind of social climber.
This is why JTarrou's example is so good. The wokeness that one needs to look out for isn't necessarily the wokeness in the game, I'm pretty sure a good woke game could be made, it's wokeness on the team that's the issue. The two will obviously be correlated, but conflating them let's people dismiss the issue via 2rafaesque arguments.
The fuck of it is, they kinda were doing this before Payday 3 to begin with. I might have to dig up this one video talking about the history of Payday 2, but in short, from my memory: Overkill/Starbreeze put out the game, made a shitload of DLC for it, tried to put it behind them as they focused on a new Walking Dead licensed game and their own snazzy VR headset project, those two things failed hard, so they went back to Payday 2 and cranking out DLC for it just to raise money to keep the lights on (complete with new "complete editions" to save you the hassle of purchasing the million DLC packs separately). I don't know why they even bothered with Payday 3 if they were going to go back to supporting 2, which did kind of make them a lot of money anyways.
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I honestly think you're impugning too much intent behind this sort of thing. I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit, I think the people making these decisions are mostly doing so out of a genuine desire to intentionally manipulate the audience into being more friendly to their ideology. And when it backfires as it so often does, in part because time and resources on that inevitably trades off against time and resources for crafting a good game with good mechanics and good narrative, they have a convenient way to deflect attention. And at this point, in 2024, this way of deflecting attention has become not just common, but downright cliche, and so they have a neat playbook to follow that they see fellow ideologues in the field turning to to protect their egos. I doubt it goes any deeper than.
Such a defense is good for media publicity. Media publicity can't make a bad work into a hit, but it can certainly increase the profit by some amount since it takes longer for people to figure out how bad it is.
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Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).
And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI. Benjamin Sisko was widely accepted and considered a badass in 1990. He was certainly a “diverse” casting choice, but because they show around him, and the character himself were both very well done, it was a popular show. Nobody was upset by it. Wonder Woman has been a popular character since she was created. We had She-Ra in the 1980s. It wasn’t seen as a bad thing until studios got lazy and decided that wha5 audiences cared about more than quality was diversity.
Indeed, some games that are criticized for things like unnecessarily masculine women are well received by many gamers for being otherwise good, such as the Horizon games and The Last of Us: Part 2 (neither received anywhere near universal praise or disdain). But it's not as if making a good game is just something someone can choose to do; even if every resource in the company was directed with laser-like focus on the goal of "make a good game," I'm doubtful that the odds are good that they'd create a good game. If priorities are split between that and injecting messaging into the game - and particularly the perspective is a "woke" one where the ideological messaging is considered to supersede other factors when determining how "good" a game is - then it becomes that much harder. Who knows how much the "woke"-ish messaging of the Saints Row reboot contributed to its many issues both with bugs and just basic game design, but given how much the entire narrative and tone of the game was steeped in it, I imagine it had a more parasitic effect than what the character models in those other aforementioned games did.
This is true, but the entire point that they're pushing is that they're already making a good product by injecting DEI and other "woke" messaging into the games. If players don't consider it so, then that means that they are wrong, and we need to put in more messaging until they get it. At their core, the ideologues who push this stuff truly believe that their ideology can never fail, it can only ever be failed. As ideological and political proselytizers, they see themselves as having no responsibility to check how effective their messaging is and to make adjustments based on that checking; rather, their only responsibility is to spread the message in the way the ideology tells them to, and if that doesn't work, then it's everyone else's fault.
It is a cliche at this point, that people labeled as sexist/racist keep pointing out that there are plenty of great works with diverse characters from yesteryear in gaming as well as in TV and film. "Woke" is a response and rejection of that; the idea that, in order to be praised, a work with women or minorities should also be good by traditional measures such as "entertainment" or "thought provoking" is, in itself, sexist/racist/White Supremacist/bigoted/etc. Rather, because we've now "awakened" to how the most salient way humans relate to each other in our society is through power dynamics between different demographic groups, we should realize that simply having these people represented in a positive way in entertainment works intrinsically make the entertainment works better. And, again, if the audience doesn't buy it, then the beatings will continue until morale improves.
I think we’re talking past each other. To be blunt, my thesis is that these people know they cannot release a good product, and have been wrapping their rather poor offerings in Woke to cover it up. Benjamin Sisko was a badass. The show was entertaining and actually did deal with racism during its own time. It wasn’t exactly subtle when they had a story about a show very much like DS9 not being able to be published if it were known that the author was a black man. I don’t think they’d be able to write a story like that today — and the story itself is pretty woke — because it requires skill to produce a story like that. It requires skill to show rather than tell, it requires thought to make a woman an actual badass (Sara Conners) without having her whine about sexism.
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Yes. This is very common now in all sorts of media.
DEI injection > Bad content > Bad reviews > 'Bigots are review bombing our content because they are bigots!' > Roll hard left and die
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