I miss the days when we can just call a game “bad” without saying woke or dei ruined it and not avting like the gameplay/mechanics/hownit was built was the actual reason why
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Its so annoying that the people who are always saying “Stop making everything political” are the ones always bringing up politics. Like I cant enjoy a cool trailer with robots and laser swords without someone being upset cause the protagonist is a black woman with short hair.
Before "Woke/DEI", we had gamer gate. Gaming journalism has always been less than stellar, look at reviews for games in nintendo power magazines. That's them regulating the journalism! Now you have "independent" reviewers that are actually rage baiting and introducing alt-right pipeline ideals.
I feel like you can't call a game "bad" without someone saying "I'm not a serious gamer or anything but I liked it" like the bar for game quality is entirely subjective and can never be objective. Desert Bus? I liked it, so it can't be a bad game! Yandere Simulator? I liked it!
And they assume you're some crazy progressive weirdo for thinking they're dumb lmao,I have my own beef with self righteous activists but these mfs are even more annoying,guess people who insist on how tough and smart they are indeed very sensitive to criticism and can't really think for themselves
yeah, why can't people just play games and have fun? like dawg "Intergalactic" main character is just a normal woman with a shaved head and people are so mad about the game because of that, even when we haven't seen a gameplay trailer or some story reveal lol
maybe I'm really far from those culture wars or whatever are those, but I think "woke" or "dei" have never been making games worse - bad story, boring gameplay, etc are what makes games bad.
It's perfectly acceptable to dislike things and especially for no reason in particular but yeah the extreme end is very tiring while the other end of hating nothing feels impossible?
Calling something "woke" is such a lazy criticism too. Any insignificant element of a game can be interpreted as woke in one way or another and since it is supposedly revealing of the devs' nefarious intentions, you don't even have to explain how it makes the game bad. It just does.
It can easily be both. Lots of modern game developers inject the message as a kind of shield from criticism. Then when people online say they don’t like the character design or story the developers say it isn’t for them. Then when it doesn’t sell they blame the fans.
Yeah the fact that there was a group of people really trying to push the phrase "fxrced divxrsity" (i omitted letters in case of bot scraping) and concepts like that everywhere including gaming was fucking annoying. Its a strategy to subliminally introduce people to fucked up ideas
And yet Marvel Rivals is a smash success, despite being a hero shooter.
Concord failed because the characters were boring at best ugly at worst in a genre where that matters a lot to sell cosmetics.
The genre itself wasn't the problem.
millions of evil 8 year old boys. i can't imagine how shitty it is to be a parent now when all these 32 year old psychopath slobs have direct access to your child's mind to broadcast the worst people's worst opinions into their fragile minds
corporations push woke aspects of their products because corp want to maximize their return on minimal investment and effort so its a convenient way to try to capture what they view as a captive woke audience (think terrible d1sney remakes) and deflect quality issues with the same accusations you
already mention. "dont listen to the critics theyre racists!!!" is the literal deflection these companies try to pull on everyone when they knowingly ship subpar media. and people fall for it a lot so im glad people are talking about it.
I had saw the trailer before hand and felt it looked interesting until I learned it was a multilayer arena shooter thing. Not a cool guardians of the galaxy style adventure.
Also it missed the GOG hype by like a decade.
It had a lot of marketing compared to other games. You want to talk about zero marketing, Helldivers 2 had zero marketing and boomed because of videos players were making and created player marketing for it. I seen way more paid marketing and betas for concord.
A tired hero shooter? People used that excuse about it being a tired hero shooter. Yet here we are with Marvel Rivals and it is absolutely booming yet is a hero shooter. Concord failed for multiple reasons. Character design, playstyle, hell even the story itself. That is without touching the ‘woke’.
It’s not my fault it has been concord coming across my feed and I toss out the many examples of what they did wrong. I also mention HD2 and the good they do as well as gaming being good to story telling and why people play them and devs shouldn’t attack their customers. Lmao but I see your point lol
You mean like with how well the avengers game did? Same popular ip yet fell off extremely fast? The IP has some to do with it but more so, it’s actually a fun game with unique playstyles even though it is yet another hero shooter. New IPs work all the time but they have to grip the audience.
And also I do believe the designs are bad not because of "woke" but they just had poor shape language and did a poor job communicating what basic role they do such as "tank" and "healer". Something the other hero shooters have under control. It's just really basically mistakes
Imagine reviewing the original CD-i Zelda games in the present day.
“THIS WOKE DUTCH COMPANY TURNED PRINCESS ZELDA INTO A STRONG INDEPENDENT GIRLBOSS WHO FIGHTS GANON’S ARMY ON HER OWN WHILE LINK IS A USELESS SOYBOY WHO TALKS ABOUT BOMBING DODONGOS!”
“WOKE”. DOESN’T. KILL. GAMES. (For their given definition of woke/DEI) I’ve gotten in so many arguments about this. As sami said, Concord failed because it was a lackluster entry into a crowded market that needed to steal players away from other games to survive and it couldn’t do it.
I’ll give you a counterpoint. Borderlands 3 is “woke” af. An established character that once ripped someone’s heart out openly cries because a lazy river theme park is destroyed. Of the two playable main male characters one is an asexual robot and the other is canonically pansexual.
I could go on, but also the writing is bad and the main villains are annoying af. Yet it’s sold well and 4 is on the way. Why? Because even people who complain about its wokeness or don’t like BLs aesthetics agree that it’s FUN TO PLAY. Gearbox has honed their looter/shooter to a fine polish.
Are companies pushing diversity in an attempt to appeal to broader audiences? Yes, it’s pretty obvious they are, and BL3 is evidence of that. Is it pissing certain people off? You bet! Is it hurting the games industry in any significant way? No. No it is not.
On the other hand, people have called perfectly good games 'ruined by woke and DEI' because of shit like the female characters weren't hot enough, or were the lead, or they weren't white.
There can be an intersection.
Lazy writing knows no genre or political bend.
A game might be bad for a plethora of reasons.
A lazy, politically voiced game with no soul might be one of the many reasons.
The worst thing about the modern internet to me is that people have financial incentive to be disingenuous rhetoric spreaders. Like I think it can at least be interesting to examine real kooks with a cause ,but engagement farmers are stifling and the only winning play is not to interact.
Like the Shiftups news about their Christmas bonuses brought Stellar Blade to mind today. And I think the game is neat and deserves some flowers and interesting criticism. But it’s just been mired in the most blasé culture war conversation that I can’t imagine discussing it online.
People also just don’t understand what woke and dei even mean, it’s just an excuse they use to say that something is bad bc it’s inclusive of people who aren’t straight white men, which isn’t what woke means at all and is very barely surface level of anything to do w diversity, equity, and inclusion
Woke/dei is a way they are comfortable saying [they] "are racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic/fatphobic/notcishetwhitesoldiermanphobic, and [game] makes them uncomfortable." They still are also trying 'bad writing/pacing/ugly women' too, but its all pretty obvious desperation to make the game fail.
And its every single game with a female protagonist or a known accepting vibe. There are people out there going to war with companies/devs for hiring women, or consulting with sensitivity readers, that sort of thing. Its fucking pathetic. They are so fragile they can't tolerate other kinds or ppl.
Really funny watching people justify their kneejerk hatred of Ghost of Yotei. A lot of them try to act like it’s because the voice actor is non binary or something, (as though that’s a good reason) but some just openly hate women. It’s so delightfully cringe.
I can't really find it funny anymore because its absolutely having a chilling effect on the success or failure of targeted games. Its sad, pathetic, and these people need to be deplatformed but there is no good way to do it.
Its getting consistently worse over time as they hone their methods.
I think a lot of the games that have failed because of “dei” really failed because nobody was interested. People have been disappointed with dragon age since well before veilguard and ubisoft has been sinking for a while now so AC Shadows was probably always going to flop (assuming it does 🤞).
Also, there is this whole recent vibe of questionable outlets and these same people sometimes seeming almost gleeful at the idea of another 'video game crash', like they want it to all burn down if they can't lock lgbtq+, women, and PoC out of it.
Maybe the people complaining about there being representation for anything other than straight, white, heterosexual in a game are only disliking the game because they're a bigot?
Maybe the game is fine and just the player is a bad person.
Anyone who cites those reasons just gets an immediate block. They are just blow hard trolls that don’t have a critical thinking bone in their body. I do not wish to hear their opinions on anything.
What's annoying is that woke has changed into a fictional construct. The left no longer uses the term and it never meant what 'conservatives' say it meant. Ditto for DEI and critical race theory. They have all been co-opted into rhetorical boogeymen.
I feel like these people exist specifically to drown out coherent criticism of media. it's some kind of mass media mkultra hyperpolarization operation. some disney marketing spook saw what gamergate was doing and made it go global for the first new star war. we may never recover 😔
I miss 2015 YouTube were conservatives didn’t exist and you’d get on and watch your favorite YouTuber with nobody screaming woke with a new video game release
I miss YouTube being free of conservative grifting losers
i was pleasantly surprised seeing the reviews for Dragon’s Dogma 2 never mentioning the ‘wokeness’. turns out, most people who actually Play Games dont gaf abt any of that shit. if the game sucks thats all they care about
Pokemon is a good example. It's a very woke series where they actually make a good effort to be woke in every new entry, but all that ends up actually mattering is how dogass the actual game is.
The anti woke people aren't worth listening to. They tried to say tears of the kingdom was bad because woke, then proceded to ignore biology and established lore to justify it, while also showing they know nothing about internet culture or the different kinds of vows that exist.
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They just didn’t like that they got a DEI consultant on it! 🤷♀️
If someone makes a story better I’m 100% for paying them. Script doctors have existed for a long time for movies
If you sell a “complete edition”, you should be legally required to call the other ones lesser editions.
Concord failed because the characters were boring at best ugly at worst in a genre where that matters a lot to sell cosmetics.
The genre itself wasn't the problem.
Also it missed the GOG hype by like a decade.
apparently the guardians of the galaxy game from a few years back was actually pretty good too so i guess theres always that
stop letting a shitty game live in your head rent free
My opinion was always because it came out with a premium price and was competing against free to play juggernauts.
If it was also free to play, more would try it.
Also the Concord Amazon episode was pretty good, IMO.
“THIS WOKE DUTCH COMPANY TURNED PRINCESS ZELDA INTO A STRONG INDEPENDENT GIRLBOSS WHO FIGHTS GANON’S ARMY ON HER OWN WHILE LINK IS A USELESS SOYBOY WHO TALKS ABOUT BOMBING DODONGOS!”
Lazy writing knows no genre or political bend.
A game might be bad for a plethora of reasons.
A lazy, politically voiced game with no soul might be one of the many reasons.
Its getting consistently worse over time as they hone their methods.
Its just sad.
Maybe the game is fine and just the player is a bad person.
Even people who are not "anti woke" are more than happy to rail on random games that are cherry picked and etc and bandwagon hate all the same
Forspoken is a perfect 7/10 treated like a 4
I miss YouTube being free of conservative grifting losers
The the insane layoffs and the indie publishers that shut down the last couple years are the most regrettable casualties.