Do we want to revisit the early days of GamerGate? Probably not, but since we seem to be in middle (or end) of GamerGate 2.0, why not? Or maybe it is just that the gaming industry is still dealing with the end the original.
In any event, The Critical Drinker Gamer always entertains. (See my post on the financial reality of the Gaming industry.)
This is the Critical Gamer's video Crash And Burn Gaming - The Anita Sarkeesian Story
The cringe is off the scale here. Just a warning.
Or so it seems to me. I am open to arguments about Movie studios dying faster.
First Sony moved their games division from Japan to the US, and then adopted US corporate BS. Xbox is part of the huge Microsoft bureaucracy. Both companies swallowed the DEI lies hook, line and sinker. And now they are sinking, because - shocking I know - gamers don't want DEI messaging jammed down their throats while they are enjoying a video game. And they have started voting with their wallets.
French video game company, Ubisoft, is probably the poster child for Get Woke, Go Broke in the gaming sphere. Their stock price has collapsed from a high of just over 90€ in 2018 to just over 5€ today. That is roughly a 90% decrease. But they are not the subject today, just a cautionary tale.
Sweet Baby Inc claims another scalp. The games studio behind South of Midnight is closing. From Video Games Chronicle: Xbox is reportedly shutting down South of Midnight studio Compulsion Games | VGC
The studio, which was founded in 2009 and acquired by Xbox in 2018, most recently developed South of Midnight.
According to Kotaku, however, the studio is set to be shut down as part of widespread layoffs at the gaming division.
The studio is in "negotiations" with Microsoft to be spun off instead of closed outright. If they have any IP worth anything, Microsoft will probably hang on to that and let the people go.
And yes, there were quite a number of Sweet Baby Inc folks "working" on that title.
From Marvin Montanaro at Geeks + Gamers we get a story about Marathon. RUMOR: Bungie Layoffs Could Eliminate 50% of Remaining Workforce After Marathon’s Failure
The future of Bungie appears increasingly uncertain as a new report claims the studio could be preparing for another massive round of layoffs, with as much as half of its remaining workforce reportedly at risk.
Bungie is a studio owned by Sony PlayStation. Rumors (out of France) are that 50% of the company could be laid off.
Bungie dropped future development support for their popular Destiny 2, to double down on their bets on Marathon.
Xbox has been in the news because of South of Midnight. People are not bullish on that company's future. From Polygon: Microsoft should get out of games before it does more damage
News that Microsoft is considering closing three of its game studios — Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games — is awful, but what's truly alarming is that it doesn't stop there. According to Bloomberg, "several other studios across the portfolio are at risk of being shuttered." State of Decay studio Undead Labs hasn't shipped a game since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. Obsidian Entertainment is prolific, but last year's Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 underperformed. Rare had its big bet Everwild cancelled and can't survive on Sea of Thieves forever. At this point in Microsoft's dismally bungled adventures in gaming, it's best to think the unthinkable.
There are a lot of details at each of those links.
The poster child for failing games, is of course Concord, from Sony. I was surprised to see that this actually died in 2024, it seems like only yesterday that everyone was pointing and laughing. Sony shut Concord down in 2 weeks, and provided refunds. There are plenty of articles and more than a few YouTube videos on that debacle.
Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony has some info/deductions about the Steam Machine. Daily News Stuff 11 May 2026: Plastic Memories Edition
It seems that Valve is building the infrastructure it needs to sell the Steam Machine.
It's not going to be cheap thanks to the RAMpocalypse, but shipping manifests show that Valve has collected 50 tons of something in a warehouse, and the latest update to Steam includes four new product codes and a reservation queue that again appear to correspond to the new device.
I'm not sure I'll get one - it's a low-end console replacement and I have multiple systems more powerful - but it's good to see signs of life.
I'm only interested in seeing the last of the Windows-only, anti-cheat software ported to Linux, even if it is only ported to Arch. Anything the pulls another block out of the Jenga Tower of Microsoft's monopoly is a good thing.
Microslop decided that they were going to inflict AI on everyone, whether they wanted it or not, whether it opened up security problems (or should I say, "more security problems") or not, and whether it made sense or not. After all, that is what Wall Street wanted to hear, so that is what upper management wanted to hear, so that is what middle management ...
Worry about what the customers want? Why would they worry about the customers? People are locked into Windows, right? Microsoft can do whatever they want, and you have to accept it. Well, maybe not so much any more.
From Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony we get the latest AI pushback. Daily Tech News 18 March 2026: Download Some Stuff Edition. The memes have been brutal. (See the image.)
NVIDIA released a "demo" of their latest "Let's shove AI into gaming, even if no one wants that" scheme.
Overwhelmingly Negative: Everybody hates DLSS 5. (Ars Technica)
Ars Technica rounds up the response to Nvidia's showcase of its DLSS 5 $10,000 AI slop filter and concludes that... It's bad.
(Not kidding about the cost: The demo required two RTX 5090s and they currently cost between $4000 and $6000 each, depending on the model. Yes, they launch at $2000. That was then; this is now.)
I can't afford a 5090. In fact the PC I'm using right now doesn't have an NVIDIA GPU because when I needed a new GPU they were already either unavailable or unreasonably expensive. If things change in the future I can revisit the situation, but really the AMD GPU I'm using is doing fine with the workload I have right now.
And yes, I know, the 5090s can be had for about $3800 add in tax and see where you are, and the higher quality ones are more like $4500 and up. The highest priced one on Newegg is over $8000 as I type this, but that seems extreme.
NVIDIA will pinky swear that they will have it back down to one 5090 before release. Great. It still doesn't look good.
Mutahar at SomeOrdinaryGamers probably has one of the better reviews. He isn't completely negative, though he is negative overall. Nvidia, This Looks Terrible... As the meme above implies, the effect has been compared to Snapchat beauty filters.
Beast in Black is a European Heavy Metal band known for the clear, and high, singing voice of Yannis Papadopoulos. Diablo is an Action Roll Playing Game/franchise that is very popular, and Berserk is a Manga from the late 1980s that spawned both anime and video games. Roll them all together and you get today's song/video.
This is what Metal Heads Forever had to say on April 29th. BEAST IN BLACK and Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo® Join Forces to release new track ‘Enter The Behelit’
The limited-edition maxi single will feature a brand-new song ‘Enter The Behelit’ from BEAST IN BLACK, inspired by Berserk and produced exclusively for the game, as well as remastered versions of fan favourite tracks ‘Die By The Blade’ from the album From Hell With Love, and ‘The Fifth Angel’ from the band’s debut album, Berserker. With many songs taking inspiration from Berserk story and characters, the Finnish heavy metal band’s music often reflects the undercurrents of struggle, fighting against overwhelming odds, and battling inner demons – themes that are prevalent in the games of the Diablo franchise.
This song is "Enter The Behelit" by Beast in Black. It was released to YouTube at the end of April, and amassed 1 million views by the middle of May.
Bungie is a division of Sony Interactive, and they got caught stealing wholesale. Again. Bungie Stealing ‘Marathon’ Art Is Probably The Last Straw
The situation is so bad, that in a recent livestream promoting the product in question, Marathon, they showed no footage of the game.
Marathon developer Bungie has been accused of, and has now admitted to, stealing artwork used in the current build of Marathon from an artist who first published the work in 2017.
That artist is ANTIREAL, who posted several comparisons of her work and existing Bungie Marathon assets which go far beyond “inspiration” and often are direct 1:1 lifts of images, words, symbols and even ANTIREAL’s own personal logo.
This was what was identified, and not by Bungie. Bungie eventually admitted to the theft, blamed it on an ex-employee, though several members of the art department apparently do follow @4nt1r34l on either X or Instagram.
There is no disputing the asset rips. They are 1:1 in many, many cases that are clear to see. The result of that, if Bungie will simply cut the artist a check and credit them, is unclear. It is possible that legal action could be pursued here but the artist did not seem to think they had the resources to mount the campaign. That could change, given the attention that this story has now gotten.
If you click the link at the top, the first image, of many, shows an image copied directly from Antireal's catalog into the game, with only the color grading being changed. Fewer changes were made in other places.
So if this was done so blatantly, did Bungie steal anything else from anyone else? A review is underway.
I believe it is too early to start naming and blaming specific individuals within Bungie, but the studio will need to do an intense investigation into this and come out with a lengthy explanation in addition to the terms they’ve come to with the artist, publicly. And they may promise this will not happen in the future but it has now happened four times in the past four years, the others with Destiny fan art that was lifted in some capacity for the game or in merchandise. That was third party contractors, however, and this is Bungie in-house. Or former in-house. Or whatever you want to believe.
So if something that should never happen, happened four times in four years, that means you have no procedures in place to prevent it, and you are not training your employees in the fine details of copyright. That would seem to be another problem.
This isn't the only example of the games industry stealing stuff. There were at least a couple of examples of similar insanity in Assassin's Creed: Shadows from Ubisoft, though only one example of plagiarism that I can recall. Aside from lifting a banner from a historical-reenactment society, Chinese architecture was included in a game based in Japan, and then there was the one-legged Torii gate fiasco.
It's almost like the large corporations think they will never get caught.
Oh, and there seems to be even more trouble at Bungie. New ‘Marathon’ Info: Bungie Morale, Launch Worries And Changing Plans
Chaos has engulfed Bungie after an artist, ANTIREAL, came forward to accuse Bungie of ripping off her 2017 work as its upcoming extraction shooter Marathon was starting to take shape as early as 2018. Bungie admitted to the plagiarism, supposedly the work of one ex-artist, and promised to make things right, but the story gained traction among gaming outlets and reaction streamers alike, and it’s poisoned the previous positive conversation about the aesthetic of the game.
But all of this is happening after another not-great time period for Marathon in the last few weeks, starting with the gameplay reveal and then its Closed Alpha, both of which received mostly mixed-to-negative feedback. A livestream on Friday addressed both the art plagiarism and Alpha feedback in what ended up being the most uncomfortable on-camera offerings I’ve ever seen from the studio.
Marathon was supposed to be released in a few months time, but that is questionable. Even if they come to some agreement with Antireal, they clearly need to review all of the art to see if anything else has been stolen.
The results of the alpha test may be a bigger hurdle.
There are a number of videos on this kerfuffle, but I will reference only Ryan Kinel's video It's OVER For Marathon! | Bungie FALLING APART After Art Theft CONTROVERSY. The video is 7 minutes. (Ryan K. is not safe for work. Probably)
Instead of just complaining about Hollywood producing crap, Snarky Jay decided to delve a bit deeper and see what they could do differently. Because the girl-boss
There is only one female character that Hollywood (and the gaming studios) can right today. She is perfect. She is only held back by the her own doubts, or the patriarchy, or something, and she will achieve her true perfection when she overcomes the patriarchy, or realizes that she was always a great person or whatever.
In other words, this Strong Female Character™ is one-dimensional, and not interesting. There are no character arcs, because she has no flaws. There is no growth; they start and end as perfect. From Rei in the Star Wars franchise, to Captain Marvel in the M-She-U, to the interpretation of Snow White we got from Rachel Z, the girl-boss character in Hollywood is not working.
It is beyond "not working." It is destroying Hollywood, and the gaming industry, which is also based on storytelling.
This is Snarky Jay's video Hollywood’s MARY SUE Obsession Is RUINING Good FEMALE LEADS!
How did these people get so much work in the gaming industry? Sweet Baby Inc Game South of Midnight Flops Hard—Another SBI Project Crashes on Launch
It’s another brutal blow for Sweet Baby Inc and its embattled CEO Kim Belair. The company’s latest narrative endeavor, South of Midnight, has officially launched—and the results are nothing short of disastrous.
Now it's an X-Box game, so the numbers of people playing on that platform will never be released to the public, but it also launched on Steam, and those numbers are public.
On Steam—still one of the most reliable barometers of public interest—South of Midnight has barely cracked 1,000 concurrent players on launch day. SmashJT, one of the most vocal independent gaming critics, noted that even a paltry 2,500 players would have been embarrassing. This game didn’t even come close.
OK, so it released on a Tuesday, but if there was any real interest, the numbers would be higher. Late Wednesday afternoon there were 1099 players with and all time high of 1411 players overnight (Tuesday night to Wednesday morning).
Az AKA Heel vs Babyface is playing the game. Here is what he had to say.
South of Midnight is a horrendously written game where the black female protagonist gets her powers from *checks notes* picking cotton!! But they can't call it cotton because of [optics?] so they call it "FLOOFY"!!!
It also has "blight" assets from Dragon Age: The Veilguard in it too (not that Bioware need them any more)!!
The main character is an entitled brat that cares only for herself.
Sweet Baby Inc do it AGAIN!!
Smash JT also had something to say. South of Midnight BUST May FINALLY Be The End of Sweet Baby Inc...
It doesn’t help that Sweet Baby Inc is credited on this game, because gamers are already pushing back hard.
Their reputation continues to nosedive as more and more people connect the dots between underwhelming, identity-driven narratives and SBI's direct involvement. A now-viral video by @HubBandar on X flat-out said it:
“#SouthofMidnight's writer. No wonder the characters and story are trash.”
So how much can you lose, and still keep getting work?
I can't find any information on how long the game was in development, or what was spent on it.
This is an epic troll, if ever there was one.
The new chapter in Assassin's Creed from Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed: Shadows has been under development for several (many?) years, and is reported to cost several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since Ubisoft decided to go down the path of DEI and make the main character in the game Yasuke, a Black Samurai, there have been many controversies. These have included everything from using Chinese architecture, in a game they promised would be historically accurate, to stealing flags from a historical reenactment group, to disrespecting the legacy of Nagasaki. There are probably more that I missed.
Shadows has also been delayed (at least) twice, and now is coming out on March 20th.
A game development studio, HistoricallyAccurateDevelopers, is releasing another game on March 20th, that is a send-up of Assassin's Creed: Shadows. Since Ubisoft has made a point that Yasuke is a person out of history, there is really nothing they can do to stop it. And yes, it does appear to be inspired by GTA, only it is set in 1500s Japan.
If you would just prefer to read an article, and not watch any video, take a look at Step Aside, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. There's a NEW Yasuke Simulator in Feudal Japan... from Smash JT. I've linked his video below.
Look, as many of you guys already know - I was already skeptical about Assassin’s Creed: Shadows for a number of reasons. Ubisoft’s track record with historical accuracy is spotty at best, and this game has all the hallmarks of another pandering, identity-driven project with at the end, no real heart.
Yasuke Simulator, on the other hand?
It’s stupid, over-the-top, completely unhinged, and looks way more fun. Almost like a GTA take on feudal Japan.
This is the Geeks + Gamers video Yasuke Meme Game EMBARRASSES Ubisoft
The internet is undefeated, and it will continue to be undefeated, and this is something that a lot of corporate America and the mainstream journalists out there can't seem to understand.
Even if this game never sees the light of day, even if it is only a trailer and a meme, it is still glorious.
The video is about five and a half minutes. It includes the trailer for the game.
There are other videos on the topic:
Side Scrollers also has some news on possible legal action that a group, that is representing Shinto shrines, is considering against Ubisoft.
One of the panelists on the Side Scrollers discussions wonders if all the insanity the video game companies are going through - seemingly all in lockstep - is a result of USAID money. The executives of the corporations don't seem to be looking out for the value of the stockholders. Is that because they are being paid off by others? Interesting question.
Well, not really one day. It took Electronic Arts years to piss off their customer base, and it took months for the market analysts to notice that they had alienated their customer base. It took one day for the market to respond.
Electronic Arts (EA) is, or at least was, one of the most successful video game companies ever. They had everything from John Madden Football and FIFA International Soccer to Dragon Age and The SIMS.
But they stopped caring about creativity, and started caring about microtransactions and The Message™. As a result, their customer base is starting to disappear.
Most recently they produced the Message Heavy™ Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which was more than a commercial flop, it is a laughing-stock.
The critical issue is the lack of revenue from FC 25, the current iteration of FIFA International Soccer. It failed to make its revenue projections, which was one of the issues leading to the stock plunge. The FIFA Football franchise has been one of their primary sources of revenue. Players are apparently done with the endless microtransactions, the expensive, yearly Downloadable Content (DLC) and the endless drain on their wallets, for not a lot in return.
On 22 January 2025, EA stock closed at $142.35 per share. The next day it closed at $118.58. I'm still drinking coffee as I type this, but that tells me, based on the current market capitalization, that Electronic Arts lost about six billion dollars in shareholder value. I'm sure that the market analysts have no clue as to what went wrong.
The embedded video is a bit long, but it is where most of this data comes from, or what inspired me to search for other data. Here is a shorter video from Smash JT: EXCLUSIVE INSIDER TELLS ALL! EA Stock In FREEFALL - BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard DISASTER!! That video is just short of 13 minutes.
This is the Legendary Drops video EA is falling apart before our very eyes. It is a long video at just shy of 35 minutes, but I think it shows what is going on with industry as a whole, and the downfall of AAA gaming. It seems to be similar to what is going on with movies.
That Park Place has a DEI disaster story. Ubisoft Value Tanks: Market Cap Dropped 85% From 2021 to 2025
85% decline in market capitalization points to horrible performance.
Once a titan in the gaming industry, Ubisoft has experienced a dramatic and concerning decline in value over the past four years. From a market capitalization of $12.17 billion in January 2021, the company’s value plummeted to a mere $1.78 billion by January 2025.
And they have been failing, just in 2024.
The first thing they released in 2024 (or the first thing I heard of anyway) was Skull & Bones. A decade in development, it cost between $650 million and $850 million. Touted as a "quadruple-A" game before it came out; it failed.
The next big game that I was aware of was Star Wars Outlaws. It was released with pretty bad coding errors, insane game story arcs, and it too failed.
Then there was Assassin's Creed: Shadows, the first entry in the Assassin's Creed franchise to be set in Japan. Ubisoft decided that the thing to do was have a game set in medieval Japan to feature a black protagonist. Japan rejected it, and the outcry was so bad in the US that they couldn't shout people down with cries of "racist." Originally scheduled to come out in 2024, the release was pushed to February, to fix the problems. They won't replace the black protagonist, they don't have time for that, but they do have time fix the type of problems that plagued Star Wars Outlaws.
Ubisoft also announced that they would discontinue XDefiant, a multiplayer game, in 2025.
Cultural and ideological overreach has also played a role in Ubisoft’s downfall. The company’s intense focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives has alienated a portion of its core fanbase. Overindulgence in DEI without balancing other strategic priorities has led to disenchantment among loyal customers and investors, contributing to the erosion of Ubisoft’s market confidence.
Workforce challenges further complicate Ubisoft’s financial struggles. The company has been forced to hire external contractors due to an overstaffed and inexperienced internal workforce.
People who make video games are not interchangeable cogs in a a machine. You can't alienate your employees, force the old ones out, bring in new employees, and expect the same results. Some of it is a creative endeavor. There are stories to be told. I haven't followed the goings on at Ubisoft closely, but other studios have seen mass exodus of game developers go and join new studios, or start their own.
Click thru for details on their financial position.
Also game companies, movie studios and other entertainment organizations can't scream at their customers "you're bad if you don't like our product." Imagine a vegetarian chef bought the biggest/fanciest steak house in your city, and completely changed the menu. Would anyone be shocked if they went out of business? A business is more than the name on the building. The customer may not always be right, but telling them to F- off is not a good way of staying in business.
The hat tip for this goes to Ryan Kinel os RK Outpost, and his video Ubisoft Is DEAD, And DEI Killed It | Lost Over 85% Of It's Value After EPIC Failures! It's a 5 minute video.
From That Park Place we get an update on the latest Woke video Game. 14% Of ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Physical Retail Orders Reportedly Cancelled Ahead Of Game’s Release, Total Pre-Orders Less Than 200,000
Dragon Age is a series of fantasy role-playing games set in world where magic, and dragons, and various other creatures need to be fought. The latest iteration of the series was released on October 31st. While the legacy media is trying to claim it is great success, people who are actually playing the game are not convinced, and the clips that have been released to YouTube or Twitter/X range from laughable to pure cringe.
YouTuber Endymion revealed that a retail insider shared with him that 956 pre-orders of a total of 6,793 were cancelled of 6,793 or 14%.
You can see what Endymion had to say at this link.
So a source who works in the retail space showed me how many pre orders got cancelled for Dragon Age Veilguard in the last few days. This is from a major store with over 900 locations in America.
He goes on to list the cancellation by platform (Playstation vs XBox), and more.
But back to TPP.
Of note, other estimates indicate that total sales for the game on Steam are less than 500,000. PlayTracker estimates the game has only 163,000 copies. VG Insights has the game at 349,800 copies sold and Gamalytic estimates the game has sold 479,500 copies.
If you assume that 500,000 copies were sold, all of the premium edition, that would mean that BioWare, the Canadian games studio that created Dragon Age, made less than $40,000,000. For a game that has been in development since 2015, that isn't a great return, even if you consider that the development team was occasionally raided to speed work on other BioWare titles. I haven't seen any reliable budget numbers, but people have been saying somewhere in the range of $250 million in development costs.
The CEO of Moon Studios, a competitor to BioWare, had bad things to say about the game. Moon Studios CEO Describes ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Writing As “Infantile And Terrible”
Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler starts by comparing the writing of TV over the past few decades. From the generic happy families of the 1980s, until we got shows that had a more genuine feeling.
“Then, in the late 90s, The Sopranos dropped and suddenly it was clear that TV shows didn’t have to be trash,” he stated. “That the episodic format could actually be used to give even more insight into characters, their trials and tribulations, etc. And it kept going from that point on – We saw more and more TV shows that delivered excellent drama, like The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc., etc.”
He then turned his attention to Dragon Age: The Veilguard and video games, “Looking at games now, it’s clear to see that we’re apparently moving back to the stone age of political correctness. I just watched a Dragon Age playthrough and it’s quite unfathomable how infantile and terrible the writing is. Everything feels sanitized and dehumanized.”
Yes, video games are created by corporations, and teams of people. So are movies and TV shows. They are still an art form. Storytelling should still be an art, and it should still come first.
“I hate to sound so harsh because I’m sure these people had the best intentions in mind, but this is what happens when art is created by amateurs, when we have to walk on eggshells and don’t dare to approach difficult subjects – you end up with a bland and bad product instead of art,” he continued.
The the case of the new Dragon Age game, what there is apparently a lot of, is gender identity. Much time is given to a companion character who declares that they are non-binary. There is even a scene in which they tell their mother, and another scene where players are lectured about how to apologize for misgendering someone. In a fantasy, role-playing game. As you can see from the copies sold numbers, this is not going over very well.
From That Park Place, we get this completely foreseeable news. Sony And PlayStation Shut Down ‘Concord’ Developer Firewalk Studios
Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation Studios Head Herman Hulst announced that it has shut down Concord developer Firewalk Studios about a year after it purchased it from ProbablyMonsters.
Sony was in love with the video game Concord. They reportedly spent a couple of hundred million dollars to acquire the game development company Firewalk Studios, from its then parent ProbablyMonsters. The amount they spent was never disclosed.
Sony then spent a couple of hundred million dollars (or a lot more than a couple of hundred million dollars) to bring the game to market. This doesn't count the money ProbablyMonsters and Firewalk Studios spent to start development.
The game was released 23 August, to much fanfare, and lot of "critical acclaim." It was a commercial disaster of epic proportions. Estimates are that Sony only recouped about $1 million of their investment.
While the game was available to play it only hit a peak concurrent of just 697 on Steam.
That is less than $30,000 gross revenue from one of the largest video game distribution services in the world.
On 3 September, less than 2 weeks after launch, Sony announced that they would be shutting down the servers, and issuing refunds to whoever had purchased the game. Now they have closed Firewalk Studios.
Speaking specifically to Firewalk Studios, [Hulst] said, “Regarding Firewalk, as announced in early September (An Important Update on Concord), certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options. After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.”
There is much talk about market conditions, and in truth Sony did just about everything wrong when it came to Concord. It entered the crowded Hero Shooter arena, when there are a number of established titles. It was derivative of those titles. While most Hero Shooters are free-to-play, and they get you to spend money in other ways, Concord cost $40 up front.
And then there were the characters.
If you click thru to the article you can see images of some of them. They were derided as Woke, Discount Guardians of the Galaxy, and more.
For a short overview of the situation see this video from RK Outpost: Woke Concord Developer SHUT DOWN By Sony After Colossal FAILURE! | Firewalk Studios Gets Shut Down
There are too many articles/videos on this incident to list. In at least a couple of them, an environment of "toxic positivity" was described. Sony (meaning, I believe Hurst) saw this as their Star Wars. In their minds it was destined to become a beloved franchise, spanning TV, movies, and merchandising. No criticism was allowed. Any comments about the characters could get you hauled off to HR for a discussion of your aversion to the revolution message. Or something.
Legendary Drops is a gamer, who talks about video games
Good games win, bad games fail.
While the embedded video does cover the current state of gaming in depth, there is a section, early on, that deals with the origins of DEI consulting, and how it has grown into a monsterous industry, that is destroying more than just video games and movie studios.
And game studios, like movie studios and other industries, are running up against the fact that in 2024, gamers don't have the budgets that they did for entertainment, 5 years ago. So they are being VERY discriminating for any games they buy. Preorders are down, because they won't risk that some DEI consultant as ruiened their favorit franchise. It's not like it hasn't happened over and over again the past few years. (See the sales figures for Star Wars Outlaws, or the current fiasco that is Assassin's Creed.)
So. What's the impact of DEI on gaming? It's performative inclusivity for Corporations and governments who have weaponized it to meet financial goals while ignoring the impact on the product or the audience. It's creating poorly executed games, surface level attempts at diversity that are nothing more than transparent greed, because we know that they don't care and we see it in broad daylight. It's dividing the people in The Gaming Community and it's being co-opted by Twitter engagement farmers and games media Fanning the Flames to keep the hatred going, keep them mad keep them fighting, because at the end of the day the only thing that matters is that they stay relevant, and it's the only way that they can make money it's about suppressing genuine criticism.
This is the Legendary Drops video The real impact of DEI in gaming
One thing that Legendary Drops covers at the end of the video, is "Why worry about video games?"
You have to worry about culture because politics is downstream from culture. And our political landscape is insane. The Democratic party is arguing that we need to have censorship to protect freedom. They want to lock up their political opponents, because how dare you disagree with me.
How did we get here? The answer is simple. The Right abandoned culture to the Left. "We're too serious to worry about trivial things like movies, TV, comic books and manga, or video games." OK. You didn't want to "worry" about culture. So I ask the conservatives, "What exactly were you trying to conserve?" It wasn't culture, and it wasn't education. You tuned both of those things over to the Left.
So what happens if you ask a Large Language Model to summarize the glowing reviews, from what Nerdrotic calls the Access Media‡, for a Woke As-F video game?
It is exactly what you would expect.
Dragon Age is a series of fantasy role-playing video games. According to the Wiki, it started as follows.
The first game in the series, Dragon Age: Origins, follows the story of a recent recruit to a legendary order of warriors known as the Grey Wardens. Their mission is to save the kingdom of Ferelden from being overrun by the Darkspawn, a monstrous race of subterranean-dwelling beings who swarm the surface world every few hundred years in a movement known as a Blight.
The fourth entry in the series is set to be released on Thursday. If you're interested, real reviewers, like Az of HeelVsBabyface, will buy the game with their own money, and stream playing it. Better bet than believing the folks who got early access.
But back to Smash JT, and ChatGPT.
And what they said... Holy crap I wasn't prepared for this.
The reviews, as summarized by the AI, claim that the game is "mainstream." It might have been in the past, but not the present.
The overall summary, generated by AI, discusses everything except the game itself, which you would think is why people would want to be playing this game. Nothing in the review summary says anything about any of that. It's all about sexuality dialogue choices, and how people are feeling when they wake up one day.
I'm like how is this a Dragon Age game? What are we doing?
This is the Smash JT video Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review Situation is a DEIsaster!
Here is the associated article from SmashJT.com:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is quite the... specimen for the modern audience. It's getting rave reviews, from reviewers who are extremely queer, or trans, or identify as other parts of the LQBTQ+ spectrum. The review situation is a clusterfck in itself, where some reviewers claim they didn't get codes because they may have appeared too critical of the games prospects leading up to launch, while other, trans reviewers, were given codes out like candy on Halloween...
‡ "Access Media" because they depend on access - mostly prior access - to movies, TV, or video games. There are a couple of instances where people who were less-than-enthusiastic in a first look at this game, who were excluded from advance access to the game in order to produce reviews. Don't say good things, even if they're true, and you will be cut off.
Of course if you lie about games, movies, whatever, too much, eventually you become a critic with no audience, which is where a lot of "mainstream" game media finds itself.
This is the funniest news I've seen all month, but then I enjoy schadenfreude.
Ubisoft is a French video games studio. They are behind the popular Assassin's Creed series. Their current project, which was recently delayed until 2025, has faced a tremendous amount of backlash, because of culturally insensitive stuff they have done.
PureArts is a designer and manufacturer of premium quality collectible figurines for the video game and the movie industries.
The two companies teamed up to produce a figurine of the Yasuke, the male protagonist from the game in question, and Naoe, the female protagonist. That figurine features a one-legged, damaged Torii gate. There is exactly one such gate in all of Japan. It was damaged in the bombing a Nagasaki, and stands as a monument to the devastation caused by second atomic bomb dropped on Japan during WWII.
From Game Rant - Assassin's Creed Shadows Statue Pulled from Sale
On September 19, the company announced another such offering in the form of a 6-inch statue of Naoe and Yasuke from AC Shadows, which was meant to expand its Qlectors lineup of PVC collectibles.
But the figure was pulled from sale less than a month later, with the manufacturer citing an "insensitive design" as the reason for its decision. "We appreciate and have learned from the concerns brought to our attention, and we apologize for the harm this caused," PureArts wrote in an October 15 statement.
You can see the image of the figurine, and the actual torii gate at this link, with some comments from RazörFist.
Vara Dark gets the hat tip by way of her video PureArts CANCELS Yasuke Statue As Ubisoft Mocks Japanese History, Assassins Creed Shadows Is CURSED
If Ubisoft has made one correct decision about this game, I can't think of what it is. They set a game in feudal Japan, a setting fans of Assassin's Creed have been asking for, and they decided to feature an African protagonist. In a stealth game, they choose a guy who will stand out wherever he goes. Then they include Chinese architecture in the settings of the game, and a flag, presumably pulled off the internet, from a reenactment society in Japan. None of this was going to endear them to the people of Japan, who take their legacy seriously. But then they unveil a collectible statue that mocks - at least in the minds of the Japanese - the bombing of Nagasaki. At that point, the Japanese started using the term "racist" to describe Ubisoft. I'm sure that isn't what they hoped for when they started this project.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (DEI) Environmental, Social, Governance. (ESG) These are the embodiment of indentity politics in corporate offices. It is destroying companies left and right, maybe especially in the gaming industry.
Endymion posted a video that was mostly about Ubisoft and implosion of their latest games, like Star Wars Outlaws, but which mentioned CD Projekt Red (CDPR). The CEO of that company immediately took to X/Twitter to call Endymion a liar. And since the Streisand Effect is still acting, here is the response by Endymion.
This video is Endymion bringing receipts, some of which are lifted directly from CDPR's own website, some from their official YouTube channel which show, yes, CDPR IS infected with DEI. I could list some of what Endymion lists, but just watch, or at least listen, to what he has to say.
This is Endymion's video Sweet Baby Agenda INFECTS CD PROJEKT RED as CEO Panics + EndymionTv SWARMED by Woke Freaks. It is a 26 minute video, but there are only a few places where you need to watch. (A clip of a Polish video with subtitles jumps to mind.)
Sweet Baby Inc. is a consulting company that "works" on video games to increase their DEI quotients. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, in video games, like it push into Hollywood, does not improve storytelling, or gameplay. It does provide employment for the "consultants." Several of the games that Sweet Baby Inc. has been associated with recently, have flopped spectacularly. Both the flops, and their involvement in the flops, and the reason the games were flops shined a light on the DEI consulting companies in the gaming arena. The CEO of Sweet Baby Inc., Kim Belair, is not happy in the spotlight these days.
And she is calling gamers who don't like these Woke games some vile names. See the articles linked below the video.
The most recent big-name game that has Sweet Baby Inc. fingerprints all over it is from Rocksteady Studios and Warner Brothers. It is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It is technically part of the Batman Arkham series, but while those games were massively successful, Kill The Justice League can't be described in anyway, except as a failure. You can find their other games listed at the DEI-Detected website.
Derek Anderson is a YouTube creator who has a lot of energy. I like a lot of his takes on stuff. This video made me smile, on a day when I needed a smile.
This is Derek Anderson - The D.A. video PURE PANIC MODE!! Sweet Baby Inc SCRUBS Website! Kim Belair CRIES VICTIM! The Walls Are CLOSING IN!!
A couple of the stories that The D.A. covers in the video linked are below.
First from That Park Place: Sweet Baby Inc. Redesigns Its Website To Remove Client And Game List As Well As Hide Its Woke Agenda
Sweet Baby Inc. redesigned its website to remove its client and game list in an apparent attempt to hide its woke agenda to potential clients.
There was a page that listed all of their clients. Then they redesigned it to make it impossible to simply copy the text. Now they have removed all reference to what companies they have worked with and what games they have impacted.
Next from Bounding Into Comics we have Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair Reflects On Company Backlash, Says Anti-DEI Critics Are Coming Together Under The “Rallying Cry Of Far-Right Supremacy”
In the opinion of company CEO Kim Belair, not only has the ongoing discourse surrounding the work of Sweet Baby Inc. amounted to nothing more than a “campaign of harassment”, but its critics’ opposition to the concept of corporate-styled ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ is an indicator of their “far-right” ideals.
Because like the folks in Hollywood can't admit that their TV shows and movies are horrible, the people from Sweet Baby Inc. and the rest of the DEI consulting firms can't admit that they are making horrible games. If you don't like a gender-swapped Han Solo in the latest Star Wars game, you are a sexist, at least according to DEI consultants. It goes on from there.
The one ray of sunshine from all of this, is that the name-calling is starting to elicit laughter. When game like Kill the Justice League, or Concord, or Dusborn gets hammered in the marketplace, calling your potential customers -ists and -phobes, over and over and over again, starts to sound like insanity. (Dustborn debuted to 83 concurrent users on Steam as an example.)
Politics are downstream of culture. For too long the Right has abandoned pop culture to the Progressive Left. "It's only comics. It's only video games. It's only movies and TV." It is only the culture. And now they are shocked to discover that the culture is screwed up, the politics are screwed up and more. Add in the Right's abandonment of education to the Left, turning state-run education into little more than communist indoctrination, and it is no wonder that this country is in bad shape. In the past 30 years, or more, if anyone on the Right even noticed what was going on in Pop Culture it was to denouce something. Even now, I don't think most people recognize where the rot begins.
Ubisoft is a game development studio based in France. They have had some success in years past, but in the recent past, they've gone woke. Their investors have paid a steep price. On 18 January 2021 Ubisoft was closed at €85.18. On 27 September 2024, it closed at €10.48. the If Wolfram-Alpha is doing my math right, that is an 88% decline. OK, 87.7% If we limit ourselves to the last 12 months, Ubisoft closed at €30.76 on 29 September 2023. That is a 65.93% decrease in the past 12 months. The bad news is accelerating.
Ubisoft released what is called a AAA game earlier this year, called Star Wars Outlaws. It should have been a big hit. However, it featured a gender-swapped Han Solo, and a lot of bugs. The protagonist is dressed like Han Solo in the original trilogy. The leather jacket. The signature blaster. And more. So much so, that some were calling her "Ma'am Solo." Why? Because that is what Woke demands. The character in the game was also an uglified version of the model/actress they based the character on. Why? Because the Male Gaze is evil, and all women in video games, and increasingly in movies and TV, must not be beautiful. I suppose all of that could have been forgiven if it was a good game. Reviews concentrated mostly on the bugs in the release. There were a lot.
Ubisoft have another AAA game that was scheduled to come out in November. It has been pushed to February of 2025. This is called Assassin's Creed: Shadows, the latest installment in their long-running franchise of Assassin's Creed. It has been embroiled in controversy. After years of ignoring pleas to set an Assassin's Creed in feudal Japan, Ubisoft did so, but decided to feature an African protagonist. Why? You are raaaacist for even asking why. They also, despite claiming that they did a lot of research, included Chinese architecture, Japanese elements from a different period in time, a sword lifted directly from an anime, and a sign stolen from a period reenactors' group.
The Coup de Grace? Ubisoft released a collectible toy that features a damaged, one-legged Torii Gate. There is exactly one such gate in Japan; it stands as a monument to the destruction of Nagasaki.
To say that the Japanese are upset about all of this is an understatement.
If there is a single thing that Ubisoft has not done wrong, in relation to Assassin's Creed: Shadows, I can't think of it right now.
This a video from Andre, of Midnight's Edge. Ubisoft CEO Gaslights Investors over Assassin’s Creed Shadows delay! It is a 13 minute video.
Following the disastrous release of Star Wars Outlaws things are bad for video game developer Ubisoft, and with the recent delay of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, things are about to get a whole lot worse. So much worse in fact that the CEO of the company is begging the investors to please believe him when he says Ubisoft is all about entertaining Gamers and not at all about agenda.
Andre briefly covers the state of western pop culture, including movies, and comic books, before delving into the history of Ubisoft, and the current set of controversies.
Here is a video from a month ago in case you need some background on Assassin's Creed: Shadows. Ubisoft Apologizes for ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ History Rewrite; Deranged Journos Blame Trump?!
The Wall Street Journal covers video games, because video games are Big Business. Usually. By way of MSN: Ubisoft Shares Slump After Investor Urges Assassin’s Creed Maker to Go Private
Shares of Ubisoft Entertainment plunged Monday after a minority investor called for the maker of the Assassin’s Creed videogame franchise to go private and install a new management team.
Ubisoft is a European (French) game studio. They have produced such games as the Assassin's Creed franchise, a few Avatar games, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction, the Far Cry series, and more. They just recently released Star Wars Outlaws, which failed. It didn't die a horrible, sudden death, like Concord, but it failed. Thanks to a lot of reasons; some of the reasons being Woke insanity, but mostly about the game being broken.
The protagonist in the game is clearly a gender-swapped Han Solo. Not satisfied with that, they built the model for the game on a beautiful actress, but made the character in the game ugly. Why? Because you are sexist for not knowing that the "male gaze" is evil, and so all women in video games, and movies and TV, need to be uglified. (Look at what they did to Sydney Sweeney in Madame Web.) As you can imagine, this did not go over well, even before the problems with the game-play came to light.
Star Wars Outlaws has been in development since 2018. A team of 600 developers and designers from 11 Ubisoft studios worked on the game. I can't find any info on the actual spend to build the game. It is continually listed as "Big Budget," and it is listed as having the highest marketing budget Ubisoft ever allocated. These games typically cost anywhere from $100 million to $500 million to produce. A top quality, well-received game can bring in double the production cost, or more in short order
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in 2011, cost $100 million to produce, and brought in $620 million in earnings. Red Dead Redemption 2 cost somewhere between $80 million and $500 million, sources vary, but it earned around $1 billion. Like I said, big business. (Reference for the bugets/earnings at this link.)
The next game from Ubisoft set for release is Assassin's Creed: Shadows, due out in November. Fans of that series had wanted a version set in Japan almost from day 1, expecting to be able to play as a ninja, fighting samurai. What they got was a black samurai, of questionable historical provenance. Why? "You are racist for even asking why." In other words, because the Woke have taken over Ubisoft. People who study this kind of thing have cut their sales projections for that game significantly.
There were a few smaller titles that were set to release in this fiscal year (ending in March 2025), but they have been delayed to "meet players’ expectations." Translation: the games had as many or more problems than the Star Wars game just released, and we don't want to be the laughingstock again. And people are laughing at the problems in Star Wars Outlaws. For example see STAR WARS OUTLAWS IS A MASTERPIECE! That is 11 minutes, and highlights problems in both game design and implementation, and serious problems with storytelling.
