FULL CLIP: Asmongold says the number one reason game studios fail is that when activists are involved in development, they don’t care about video games and instead push their ideology after reacting to EA shutting down BioWare 😳👀

“This is the big problem, is that whenever you f video games, the big thing that's a problem is that activists don't care about video games fundamentally. It's not like the activist. All they wanna do is, they just wanna make a character g*y. The problem is that whenever you have those people that are involved in development, they have no interest in what the gameplay loop is. They have no interest in how fun it is to play. They have no interest in how interesting this boss fight is. They don't care about the narrative outside of how it dovetails into their ideology”

@fwprismints:
* they get a paycheck but they have no loyalty. It's not their company so they're not invested in its survival. Or even in its success.

*While this lack of loyalty to the company is nothing new, many employees in other industries have a sense of personal pride in performing well and building a resume of achievement from a job well done or a successful product launch. That is missing here, and in all western AAA game development companies. There is no interest in leaving a legacy of performance or high achievement. You can see this in high-value releases that play poorly, lack innovation, remove the player's involvement or otherwise infantilize the player's experience.

*Deconstructive storytelling takes familiar motifs and breaks them apart: strong male leads, junior male learns the ropes, female support as a muse etc. are broken into strong woman leads, strong male is comic relief etc.

*Marxist storytellers use deconstructive techniques to destroy existing franchises, but without a specific reason or payoff. Feminizing a male lead seems to be done purely as punishment to gamers, as in "ha ha, he's actually gay!", rather than a follow on to a thread or unresolved conflict from a previous episode in the franchise. For example, a character may be revealed to be gay by showing him holding hands with an NPC romantic partner. There's no relevance to the plot. Where as, if it is revealed that the loss of a supporting character in a previous episode has motivated the main character since that was his previous romantic partner, thus explaining his desire for revenge against the opposing forces, whom the main character blames.

*Marxist storytellers seem to believe that they can repeat the same messages over and over ("All the men are gay!", "Bossbabes are as tough as men!", "Gender transition is totally natural") and that gamers will eventually accept this, both in-game and in the real world. This idea of "repetition becoming reality" ties together all of the above points: it's worth it for Marxist developers to let AAA game developers burn if they can repeat the message enough times through seeded popular franchises. They don't care if they destroy the AAA developer or the franchise if they can gain converts to their cause. This conviction to these controversial themes seems to have worked some kind of voodoo on major players like Microsoft, Ubisoft and others to go along with the radical franchise entries that completely deviated from historical trends. These of course resulted in historic losses and incalculable destruction to franchises. This is why WOW:Forever's Olympus is so vitally important. It's literally forcing Blizzard to return to course.

*The problem is, gamers don't play inside indoctrination centers. They play with friends in high-testosterone, banter-filled sessions that completely ignore ideology and preaching. If the game does not offer them hours of entertainment, they won't play and then there's no point in trying to inculcate them with race/gender politics themes in-game and you end up with studio closures.

@DogInATutuu@fwprismere, but what a lot of people don't realize is these people aren't that different from you or me.

Most of us will believe what we want to believe, and we are prone to misconceptoins.

The biggest misconception of gamedev was that they were the majority.

They believed that because they only hired people who thought like them, and that's all they see in their day to day in their bubbles they OBVIOUSLY they are a majority.

They would go on reddit, get all their views parroted back, they would go on the news on get their opinoins affirmed, they were part of this well oiled machine designed to amplify thier confirmation bias.

But it warped their perception of reality in ways that made them innefective as game designers, part of that was endless toxic positivity... "why try?", "why work hard?" Everyone is just going to say your work is amazing so long as you do the same in kind, it's how these work places work.

But more than that, they started to drink their own kool aide, they started to think there were invisible modern audiences out there that thought exactly as they did, they thought there would be customers buying the game because they shared the same cause, had the same desires to see the games succeed as they did.

This industry as a whole lost sight of the very difficult process of making games and experiences that are actually worth playing and experiencing.

So while you had studio still doing some good work, making neat art, making fantastical worlds.... the hard earned skillsets that make the fundamental elements of the "secret sauce" got lost in the agenda, in the affirmations.

Greatness and fun games, do not come easy, they require endless effort, toil, and failure, but most of all STANDARDS! And a meritocratic environment where these efforts hold value in the culture of the studio, not mindless pandering.

@SeaCritDeva@fwprism't mean to convey that these studios were homogeneous centers with Mao's Little Red Book on every desk and an brainwashed drone in every chair. Were there "bad" people? I'm sure there were, but that's the same in every office over 50 people. The rest are generally competent and capable, but maybe easily swayed?

It only takes a few (well-placed) people to move the direction of the project. The rest go with the flow, or are so micro-focused that they don't notice the tilt left.

The thing I notice here is that the people you refer to live and work vicariously. Work on screen, socialize (through Reddit or similar) onscreen, get news from a screen. If you log off and do any kind of non-screen interaction with actual humans, you can find people with different degrees of attitudes. It only changes/broadens your POV. It did with me.

But that is just confirmation of the "repetition becomes reality" I spoke of. They live it virtually or through biased, conflict-free means that they control. Which just means their ideas were never challenged.

Maybe it's environments that are built on consensus rather than merit that are the problem? I see you touch on it a bit (the "toxic positivity" stuff), and my own personal history was of competitive/cooperative work spaces that generated huge volumes of ideas and methods that got mercilessly ranked, sorted and implemented with the rest disposed of. But if that competition/merit is avoided because "some people can't handle conflict", then that alone tells you that the product would fail in a market competition.

Good stuff.