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Notes -
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
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 😈
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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