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Notes -
The video game industry became "woke" because of a combination of factors.
First, the whole tech industry is woke and video games are technology. Input/output, California, etc. Austin is a video game development hub, the blue-ing of it followed. Hell, look at AI.
Second, video games were considered an endless growth industry, "recession-proof" and with infinite potential for monetization and expansion. They made more money than Hollywood a while ago and the trend has continued ever since. The more money you get, the more investors salivate at the thought of unloading their capital cannons at something and flakking it to death. You also tend to attract vultures who see opportunities for easy grift or coasting. A diversity consultant at a video game company doesn't do much in the way of actual work but can get a good salary when times are good and potentially infinite growth means lots of opportunities for free money.
(Creative industries awash with cash don't tend to make very good use of this cash; this is not unique to video games either.)
Third, it's known that DEI/ESG investing makes it easier to get loans. Triple-A video game development is lengthy and very expensive. Why fund your own development when you can get a low-interest loan to do it for you as long as you DEI a bit? Better yet, you can use it to hedge against your failure, because you, personally, didn't lose money. Blackrock did! Roll hard left and die, or die and roll hard left etc.
Finally, there's something that Steve Jobs famously identified; as companies grown, product guys get sidelined in favor of marketing guys. Marketing guys end up running the company, and marketing guys are very sensitive to how their companies are perceived. Everyone swallowed the meme about how consumers don't like supporting companies or brands that don't share their values, and the loudest people that end up giving marketing guys the most input on the internet with the most social reach tend to be very loud about social justice in particular.
Video game development is very, very hard. The modern SDLC can occasionally write functional software or simple CRUD apps to spec, but very rarely will it make a genuinely fun game. The fun in a game requires near-autistic levels of dedication to design, interaction with players, and a wealth of technical knowledge to even implement, let alone test. Hand-adjusting animations frame by frame for simple actions or interactions, hours spent manually adjusting the lighting for areas, design documents written in arcane notes over napkins, walls and coffee tables, playing and iterating again and again.
It's pretty apocryphal that during Blizzard's golden age they knew what they were onto winners when their own employees would put off working on the game to play the game they were making some more.
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