If you think all of your entertainment is turning into woke sludge, you aren't wrong. In the world of gaming there are a handful of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting companies" that will help make a game woke. I guess these game studios doubt their ability to do woke without help.
This all came to a head with the recently released game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from Rocksteady Studios. It became known that a consulting company, Sweet Baby Inc., had made the game the woke nightmare that it is, or at the very least helped to make it that way. I won't give you details, there are endless articles, Tweets, and YouTube videos on the subject, that are easy enough to find.
A gamer who goes by Kabrutus took it upon himself to research Sweet Baby Inc., and document what games they are involved in. This was originally as easy as going to the Sweet Baby website, because they were quite proud of what they had done. I understand that they have lately taken to obfuscating their involvement in games. Kabrutus started a curated list of games on Steam to share that info. The Left, and the gaming journalists (but I repeat myself), went nuts, and Sweet Baby, Inc. employees even tried to have him banned from Steam. They failed.
That list, which started with a few thousand followers before the cancellation attempt, now has more than 375,000 followers. (The Streisand Effect is still in force!)
So now we have the upgrade, not limited to a single consulting company, but any of the dozen or so Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultants screwing up gaming. DEIDetected. It went live on the 23rd of April.
I expect that there will be much wailing and screaming coming from the Left. Here is how Kabrutus describes the effort on the "About" page.
DEIDetected is the natural evolution of Sweet Baby Inc. detected, it is well known for a time that Sweet Baby Inc. isn't the only company forcing DEI into video games, so with the 400k followers mark on the curator page getting close I think that this is a perfect time to expand and start talking about what other DEI consultancy companies are doing with video games too.
A couple of gaming studios have gone out of business when the games they invested heavily in (games are not cheap to produce) were soundly rejected by the market. I don't know that Rocksteady will be destroyed by all of this, but the studio won't be helped by this game. Rocksteady's 'Suicide Squad' game sinks to an all-time low player base, which doesn't bode well for the game's future.
According to SteamDB the number of concurrent users playing Suicide Squad has fallen to 118, with an all-time high of 13,459 reached shortly after launch.
For the sake of comparison, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is being outshined by other live-service titles like Helldivers 2 and Fallout 76, which are enjoying huge amounts of concurrent players at this moment with over 30,000 players for Fallout 76 and over 84,000 for Helldivers 2.
The all-time peak user count for Helldivers 2 was 458,709 hit shortly after launch.
The article goes on to compare that game with a few current successful games, and one historic flop.
Like Film and TV, no one really expects the gaming industry to abandon DEI for a while. But then no one expects Woke games to be successful going forward. As in Film, the "modern audience" isn't big enough to sustain the industry.
