domain:mgautreau.substack.com?page=2
SerialStateLineXer
2hr ago
It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Figures 1, 3, and Table 5 might tell a different story to some folks. 5-10% unfilled can easily be chalked up to various frictions (see also discussions of things like the general unemployment rate), and one could think that the percentage unfilled would remain approximately constant if the number of slots were increased within some range.
All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes.
The most profitable franchises in core gaming (FIFA, GTA) were made as profitable as they are by an Australian grifter with no real tech skills (Andrew Wilson) beyond html (they hired him because he was a jock, unironically it’s on Wikipedia) and the Houser brothers, who were two London rich kids with no technical skills who started a music label.
What happens when you don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP, run by German autists who missed out on 30 years of technical progress. Epic would be toast right now if they didn’t get lucky with Fortnite, they only had the money to pivot unreal into film because of it.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
Horizon: Forbidden West
Spider Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?
Cardinal Richelieu is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious. He manipulates dumber men to do his dirty deeds for him. And yet he's a magnificent bastard worthy of respect, while Milady is put down like a viper. She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.
Men hate when women characters like this are empowered. We've had a discussion of Heartbreakers on the Motte recently and I think we have discussed Gone Girl as well. So of course the old manipulative Milady was replaced with the new one, the one that can escape in the final reel.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
3hr ago
Sure, but they're much rarer than they think they are. Labeling oneself heterodox is a poor indication of actual heterodox thinking.
sohois
3hr ago
Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
Everytime I see facts about this game, the budget and development time grow larger.
Wikipedia currently lists an 8 year dev time for Concord. But it's not directly sourced, and it doesn't seem to match reality. The studio that created the game wasn't even founded until 2018. Maybe some of the founders were had an idea for a hero shooter in 2016, but if you included all ideation for a game everything would have ridiculous development times
sohois
3hr ago
Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?
As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.
So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?
Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.
How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?
What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?
Hogwarts
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Spider Man 2
Diablo 4
Jedi: Survivor
Mortal Kombat 1
Starfield
Call of Duty
Elden Ring
Madden
God of War: Ragnarök
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Pokémon
FIFA
Horizon: Forbidden West
MLB: The Show
Battlefield 2042
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Resident Evil: Village
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.
The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.
Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.
If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).
Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.
Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.
Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.
Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.
End users, as you say, no real issue.
And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?
Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.
Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.
No_one
3hr ago
Did the guy collect some recent Ukrainian jokes ? They ought to be pretty similar given the common cultural descent.
No_one
3hr ago
.. and given how dumb his shitposting it, I really doubt he spends much time on it.
TwiceHuman
3hr ago
That's a strong argument, I will give you that. We can only hope for something better if either of these are true:
1: We're more intelligent now
2: The ancients stopped progressing because they were content with what they achieved
3: Modern technology or circumstances makes it possible to go further (biofeedback and such?)
4: Having access to all of these different schools of knowledge thanks to the internet, and being able to combine them or pick the best parts of each, allows us to go further in some sense.
That being said, it's not an uncommon idea (and I discovered it myself independently) that we are god, and that we had to make ourselves forget that we were, in order to be able to live. If you wrote a book, and you were to enter the story you had written, then you'd need to forget that you were the author in order to enjoy it and immerse yourself in it. Being god is empty. "Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain". Even people who reach the peak in video games tend to get the urge to start over. Besides, limitation is important. Writers block is a result of having too many choices. "Everything" and "Nothing" have many things in common. I think they might be the same thing, actually. Things can only exist with limitations (Language can only exist because some combinations of letters and punctuation aren't allowed)
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
You're not wrong overall, but FWIW there absolutely are non-woke devs. Very few are explicitly anti-woke, though, that's a very small niche. And either way, they try to keep their politics out of the public as an issue of self-preservation. The userbase being anti-woke isn't entirely true - there are elements of it, but numerically I think the vast majority of players are actually just plain not interested in politics. There is a sizable group of vocal anti-woke players, but they're a drop in a bucket compared to the many more who just want to grill game.
One problem is that even anti-woke devs need to cooperate with woke publishers, influencers, reviewers, community managers, contributors, and of course a sizable woke customer base. Very few anti-woke people who work in game development for reasons you have pointed out. It's better for devs to try and be apolitical than to risk suffering sabotage, bad or no publicity, uncooperative business partners, negative reviews and alienating a large number of potential customers. It's a woke ecosystem; you can't thrive in it by swimming against the current. And given how ridiculously oversaturated the market is, it's hard enough to make a profit without making yourself a public enemy.
As a result, non-woke games made by non-woke devs do absolutely exist. Take any game without controversy about it, and chances are it's one of them.
But who can make an anti-woke game? It might have to be someone who doesn't care about an uncooperative environment and doesn't care about making a profit, i.e., an indie hobbyist. Those games exist, but they usually don't gain much traction, visibility or longevity, because this type of dev has very limited resources with which to make an actually good game. Alternatively, a serious game development company that managed to associate itself with politically indifferent influencers, publishers etc. might decide to market a game as explicitly anti-woke...but it would still have to be a good game, else they're just shooting their cause in the foot and ruining their own future prospects on top of it. But here's the rub, for a hobbyist or a company: if they can make a good game, then why not market it to everyone instead of just the small anti-woke minority? Ultimately even anti-woke gamers are gamers first and anti-woke second, that's why they play games at all, and will play a good game over a politically appealing game.
In conclusion, game development is a woke world with very little breathing room to spare, and trying to fight an uphill battle in there just has you run out of oxygen.
While Japan is an entertainment superpower, and mostly doesn't make woke games, I don't think it's that strange that people want non-woke stuff from American studios. It's not like telling people that India is making a bunch of awesome action movies that aren't woke will suddenly make them feel good about the fact that Star Wars has a Mary Sue as the main character. (Though seriously, people should check out some good South Indian movies like RRR, Karnan or Baahubali. Some of my favorite movies of recent vintage, and very trad.)
vorpa-glavo
4hr ago
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs?
I think the problem with any endeavor like this is that you end up with the "Christian music sucks" effect. You're hiring from a smaller talent pool, and so the works that get created are going to be, on average, of worse quality, and if a work gets too preachy it can be a turn off to some people.
Just as I'm sure there's not many non-Christians earnestly watching "God's not Dead", I assume that most non-anti-woke people wouldn't line up for an explicity anti-woke game.
The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.
Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.
The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.
I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.
And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
4hr ago
But becoming a chieftain, settling down and having children would.
TwiceHuman
4hr ago
This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.
TwiceHuman
4hr ago
You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.
HaroldWilson
4hr ago
(like maybe trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, and it's just possible that some sex offenders with penises who want to be sent to women's prison are not sincere about their gender identity, and also they are like 0.5% of the population so maybe everything doesn't have to be about them!). Like, I can say this (and I do), but I know I am picking a fight when I do, so I have to decide if it's worth it, and which people I am going to alienate.
Isn't this just part of the 'no politics at work' taboo? Now I know you're complaining about the asymmetry that you're frowned upon for expressing your views but a certain kind of affirmation politics is permitted. But I don't think they're necessarily equivalents. I doubt even a DEI seminar would ever take an explicit position on policy questions like prison or sports legislation.
everything doesn't have to be about them
I don't think everything is...
vorpa-glavo
4hr ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.
Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.
Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.
If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.
The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".
Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:
- Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
- Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
- Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
- Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
- Rinse and repeat
They have no agency.
Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.
Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.
The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.
Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.
To be direct:
- Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
- MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
- Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
- Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
- Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
- Devs keep getting abused
- Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
- Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
- Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
- MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
- Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
- CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
- 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
- -> WE ARE HERE
All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.
When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.
My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related
Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.
sun_the_second
4hr ago
I think the moniker "a woman in real life" (as in "those incel gamers have never seen a woman in real life") is meant to acknowledge that Aloy is depicted below the 70th percentile or wherever "less attractive" starts for you.
This whole theory rests on a no true Scotsman. Any time intelligence is categorized more than one step away from IQ it's just the author letting out their biases.
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