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I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
They learned from the film industry. If you think the Ghostbusters reboot sucks, obviously that means you're a misogynist alt-right manbaby troll.
DEI is just the newest way to polish the turd.
I didn't watch the female Ghostbusters. I liked the general idea of a reboot and having them all gender-swapped wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but the clips I saw and the fawning coverage about Kate whosis turned me off. I didn't think they were funny (apart from Chris Hemsworth being game to parody his "all brawn no brains" image) or as good as the original. So I didn't bother watching it, because "ooh she licked the guns, so strong female sexy daring!" does nothing for me.
So "all-women Ghostbusters" didn't put me off, "these women as Ghostbusters" did.
I think often DEI is used as a shield, maybe the original movie/game/show didn't have a DEI agenda explicitly, but it just sucked, people complained, and rather than admit "okay we made a shit product", the creators then scrabble around for "uh, uh, they hate it because - woman character! black character! gay character! it's prejudice, not because we made a shit product!"
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That explanation doesn't work because in many cases "this game / book / movie / comic wasn't made for you, chud" comes way before it's anywhere close to finished.
It also makes no sense to blame it on unwillingness to spend money - never played Payday, but cheaper indie games do better numbers than this for a much lower budget, and if they wanted easy money for little investment, they'd resell the previous one with updated assets, and call it a sequel. The success of these artistic and semi-artistic projects generally isn't about the money in itself, it's about catching lighting in a bottle. You need a good team, that wants to put something out, and works well together. This is hard in the best of times, as several well-funded corporations found out upon being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen from them by a well functioning startup. But wokeness adds another layer of issues, it's hostility to meritocracy will result in losing key talent via "who needs this asshole, we'll just hire someone more agreeable", people being terrified of providing necessary negative feedback, and will attract the worst kind of social climber.
This is why JTarrou's example is so good. The wokeness that one needs to look out for isn't necessarily the wokeness in the game, I'm pretty sure a good woke game could be made, it's wokeness on the team that's the issue. The two will obviously be correlated, but conflating them let's people dismiss the issue via 2rafaesque arguments.
The fuck of it is, they kinda were doing this before Payday 3 to begin with. I might have to dig up this one video talking about the history of Payday 2, but in short, from my memory: Overkill/Starbreeze put out the game, made a shitload of DLC for it, tried to put it behind them as they focused on a new Walking Dead licensed game and their own snazzy VR headset project, those two things failed hard, so they went back to Payday 2 and cranking out DLC for it just to raise money to keep the lights on (complete with new "complete editions" to save you the hassle of purchasing the million DLC packs separately). I don't know why they even bothered with Payday 3 if they were going to go back to supporting 2, which did kind of make them a lot of money anyways.
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I honestly think you're impugning too much intent behind this sort of thing. I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit, I think the people making these decisions are mostly doing so out of a genuine desire to intentionally manipulate the audience into being more friendly to their ideology. And when it backfires as it so often does, in part because time and resources on that inevitably trades off against time and resources for crafting a good game with good mechanics and good narrative, they have a convenient way to deflect attention. And at this point, in 2024, this way of deflecting attention has become not just common, but downright cliche, and so they have a neat playbook to follow that they see fellow ideologues in the field turning to to protect their egos. I doubt it goes any deeper than.
Such a defense is good for media publicity. Media publicity can't make a bad work into a hit, but it can certainly increase the profit by some amount since it takes longer for people to figure out how bad it is.
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Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).
And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI. Benjamin Sisko was widely accepted and considered a badass in 1990. He was certainly a “diverse” casting choice, but because they show around him, and the character himself were both very well done, it was a popular show. Nobody was upset by it. Wonder Woman has been a popular character since she was created. We had She-Ra in the 1980s. It wasn’t seen as a bad thing until studios got lazy and decided that wha5 audiences cared about more than quality was diversity.
Indeed, some games that are criticized for things like unnecessarily masculine women are well received by many gamers for being otherwise good, such as the Horizon games and The Last of Us: Part 2 (neither received anywhere near universal praise or disdain). But it's not as if making a good game is just something someone can choose to do; even if every resource in the company was directed with laser-like focus on the goal of "make a good game," I'm doubtful that the odds are good that they'd create a good game. If priorities are split between that and injecting messaging into the game - and particularly the perspective is a "woke" one where the ideological messaging is considered to supersede other factors when determining how "good" a game is - then it becomes that much harder. Who knows how much the "woke"-ish messaging of the Saints Row reboot contributed to its many issues both with bugs and just basic game design, but given how much the entire narrative and tone of the game was steeped in it, I imagine it had a more parasitic effect than what the character models in those other aforementioned games did.
This is true, but the entire point that they're pushing is that they're already making a good product by injecting DEI and other "woke" messaging into the games. If players don't consider it so, then that means that they are wrong, and we need to put in more messaging until they get it. At their core, the ideologues who push this stuff truly believe that their ideology can never fail, it can only ever be failed. As ideological and political proselytizers, they see themselves as having no responsibility to check how effective their messaging is and to make adjustments based on that checking; rather, their only responsibility is to spread the message in the way the ideology tells them to, and if that doesn't work, then it's everyone else's fault.
It is a cliche at this point, that people labeled as sexist/racist keep pointing out that there are plenty of great works with diverse characters from yesteryear in gaming as well as in TV and film. "Woke" is a response and rejection of that; the idea that, in order to be praised, a work with women or minorities should also be good by traditional measures such as "entertainment" or "thought provoking" is, in itself, sexist/racist/White Supremacist/bigoted/etc. Rather, because we've now "awakened" to how the most salient way humans relate to each other in our society is through power dynamics between different demographic groups, we should realize that simply having these people represented in a positive way in entertainment works intrinsically make the entertainment works better. And, again, if the audience doesn't buy it, then the beatings will continue until morale improves.
I think we’re talking past each other. To be blunt, my thesis is that these people know they cannot release a good product, and have been wrapping their rather poor offerings in Woke to cover it up. Benjamin Sisko was a badass. The show was entertaining and actually did deal with racism during its own time. It wasn’t exactly subtle when they had a story about a show very much like DS9 not being able to be published if it were known that the author was a black man. I don’t think they’d be able to write a story like that today — and the story itself is pretty woke — because it requires skill to produce a story like that. It requires skill to show rather than tell, it requires thought to make a woman an actual badass (Sara Conners) without having her whine about sexism.
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Yes. This is very common now in all sorts of media.
DEI injection > Bad content > Bad reviews > 'Bigots are review bombing our content because they are bigots!' > Roll hard left and die
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