Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn’t have any flops? That was completely laid off?
He pointed that out as an exception. But, it’s been mostly the AAA studios that produced massive, massive high-budget flops, and then they laid off a bunch of their staff.
But it’s not developers doing that, it’s publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, “I’ve decided to make live-service schlock”. But they’re the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.
No, but when developers and the rest of the teams see that it’s “live-service schlock”, they should start looking at their resumes, instead of thinking “well, my job is safe because it’s a large corporation”.
Why would anybody working on Concord think that it’s a good game with a good concept that is going to succeed? Or Kill the Justice League? Or Multiverse? You think all of those microtransactions and attempts at catching some unoriginal idea are going to be well-received?
Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.
He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs
No, look at what they did before they talked about the layoffs. Sure, calling out the layoffs is justified and it’s worth reporting.
What’s not worth reporting is what Twitter is saying about any of this, and then going on some soapbox trying to counter it. Thus, promoting this idea that the general public gives a shit about whatever fight this is, when in reality, they don’t even know it exists. He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.
Fuck Twitter. Stop reporting on Twitter. It’s a shit platform that is a tiny, tiny microverse of actual people doing actual things that don’t see any of that. Obviously, nobody looked at a game and thought “oh, well, that’s too woke, so I’m not going to buy it”. They didn’t buy it because it was a shit game with shitty microtransactions.
And if you check the comments, his fans definitely heard the whistle too.
I checked the comments. I read the comments on most YouTube videos. I saw nothing of the sort. Most of them are praising him for what he’s saying.
Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis. It’s manufactured bullshit that gets echoed only because they report on whatever some dude on Twitter said. I don’t know why you would mistake that as some dog whistle.
“As a customer I’m going to be honest, I just don’t care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through.” (7:10 in the video)
Right, instead of talking about the discussion as a whole, let’s take some out-of-context quote he said in the video and use that as evidence that he doesn’t care about the industry.
You didn’t even quote the entire sentence: “…especially when it’s mismanagement to blame.” I guess that bit didn’t fit your narrative?
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.
This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.
This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.
If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.
He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content. Why do you think the video thumbnail is from BG3, coupled with “It’s all lies”? Cause’ Larian didn’t have layoffs, so it’s not that part of his criticism.
And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.
Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He has a lot of good points about rainbow/pink-washing, but then ultimately ends on it being a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.
“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).
It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”
He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.