GamerGate 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Gordon3]

A summary of what's been trending on social media for a week: there was a Spiderman game last year with story lines about a gay relationship and a deaf poet vandalizing property...in a superhero game. Credits included a "gaming consulting firm" called Sweet Baby, Inc. They claim to do "‘sensitivity readings’ to ensure that no part of it, whether that be a piece of dialogue, a character depiction, or even a visual, causes any offense to any number of demographics." (https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/...arger-problem/)

Now to me, this seems like a core competency of game developers, that this work should be done internally. Nah, just farm it out. This firm, according to its web site, will help a developer "tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.” But, looking at those credits made it clear that Sweet Baby employees were pushing an "abundance of hamfisted and performatively progressive narrative decisions – which included canonizing its version of Black Cat as bisexual, having Peter fully hand off his identity to Miles, and ensuring that absolutely zero police NPCs are ever actually seen in-game." (above link)

Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery Games laid a stinker called Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game that received nearly universal negative reviews. A particular bugaboo occurred over the ending, where a female character, Harley Quinn (who WBD is pushing to replace Batman in future Gotham games), executes Batman in cold blood by shooting him in the face. Suicide Squad is also one of those "live service" games where you're supposed to keep feeding the game money to buy special costumes for your character, and other stupid s*** like that. Who consulted on this game? Sweet Baby, Inc.

A Brazilian user of Steam, a game downloading service, decided that enough was enough. He went to Sweet Baby's web site and copied & pasted a list of games that they worked on to a "curation list" (https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44858017/). If you follow this list, games on the list will automatically be flagged as Not Recommened. Over 250,000 users have followed so far, in what could amount to a very expensive economic boycott. SBI made this worse by bombing ExTwitter with demands that this Steam user be banned (https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/...st-their-work/). Evidently, they never heard of the Streisand Effect (never draw attention to publicity that hurts your interests).

It's important to note that there have been very few to no threats or harassment online, just a group of people deciding to spend their money elsewhere. Like with GamerGate 1.0, mainstream gaming sites have been blaming the customer (https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/...weet-baby-inc/). In a clumsy article by Kotaku, they alleged that SBI were nothing more than "script doctors" (https://kotaku.com/sweet-baby-inc-co...dei-1851312428). Hilariously, Kotaku writer Alyssa Mercante "attempted to play ‘shocked victim’ after she was kicked from the Discord server for the ‘Sweet Baby Inc. Detected’ Steam Curator List whilst trying to dig up dirt on the company’s detractors (after all, what did she expect when she used her real name and photo on the profile she used to infiltrate the server?)".

But, it doesn't really matter who this firm is, the boycott is ultimately against those who hire the likes of Sweet Baby, Inc. If the gaming industry is truly "diversifying naturally, as the developers diversify", we'll see how the sales of these games hold up once customers are better informed about who is behind them. It's possible that the Stockholm Syndrome suffered by the most-abused, most-loathed audience in entertainment, video game players, has finally worn off. Over a decade of loot boxes, microtransactions, bad & buggy games, blatant money grabs, and insulting story lines have caused the customers to have an epiphany.

And this couldn't come at a worse time. Massive consolidation, a failure rate of AAA titles rivaling that of the movie industry, the enormous costs of producing games, and the oversaturation of live-service games will mean that economic boycotts will hurt, a lot. A couple of recent medium-sized games and last year's Baldur's Gate 3 have been bright spots for the industry. But, the video game industry is likely to embark on a losing streak matched only by Hollywood.

Pass the popcorn, again.

[InfaniteWalrus]

I just watched video game and gender issues critic and Ed The Sock's former sidekick Liana K discuss this on YouTube.

[movieman88]

A particular bugaboo occurred over the ending, where a female character, Harley Quinn (who WBD is pushing to replace Batman in future Gotham games), executes Batman in cold blood by shooting him in the face.

This is uniquely sadistically cruel & egregious because it's not just another dime a dozen alternate Universes we could ignore like Injustice, this is the beloved Arkham-verse Batman we have been playing for 14 years. AND it's the final Batman voice job by Kevin Conroy (RIP) who is widely considered the definitive greatest Batman actor for the last 31 years, consistently loved far more than any live action version.

[movieman88]

https://youtu.be/PyzeV5kARas
https://youtu.be/Iq86DnmX2xY

[sledge]

Go woke - go broke
And i couldn't less care - filming- and gaming-industry will survive this bull...

[Gordon3]

Note: Welcome back VEF! This is a repost of two previous posts that were lost in the recent outage:

The Quartering Podcast recently featured former executive & game developer at Blizzard, Mark Kern (@Grummz on ExTwitter) that I have transcribed as follows:

The way games are funded you don't use your own money. Even EA, its games are hugely expensive to make. They're, they're upwards of, you know, 250, sometimes 600 million dollars. It's for certain live games. It's incredibly how expensive they are and to do that, uh, your CFO [Chief Financial Officer] is your best friend.

You're counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks, to get you in to put studios in regions which are financially favorable, and you will borrow the cheap money. You will get a cheap money to do it. Even EA does this. I worked with EA. We were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had, and they were applying that cheap money towards games. Same thing with Covid money. They're applying that cheap money towards games, and what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low? You know, a couple of years ago? It was ESG financing, and so they're going to take this money.

Because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds, that source of revenue is drying [it] up. This Woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming, and I think unfortunately, it's so entrenched that you're not going to see-—you're not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are—-they're just gonna shut down.

Games have gotten more expensive to make, and yet at the same time, the developers are increasingly inefficient in the development process. Every time Sweet Baby, Inc. complains about something in a game that has to be "fixed", that's more money down the toilet. None of that cash goes into testing or the final product. Rumors have it that the studio of the aforementioned Suicide Squad has already been shuttered (nominally, the studio is the contractor that does the work of development for the publisher, in this case, Warner Bros. Discovery).

I don't know anyone in the games industry, so I really had no idea just how much debt these companies are getting into and have gotten themselves into. At the same time, video game customers just don't trust the big corporations to release a good product that doesn't try to rip off or insult the customer base. The bulk of the industry is stuck between loan sharks, the new McCarthyism, and a pissed off group of people increasingly less willing to pay them off.

Here's more from Kern on that podcast:

And one thing that everyone needs to realize is that it's not that these studios are funding the games out of their own pocket. And that would be very expensive for them, cash is king. They will preferably go out and get money from other sources if it's cheap enough. It helps spread the risk of developing these massive titles.

And so you have a lot of quid pro quo happening and I can tell you that devs have been approaching me...and there are funding deals out there for studios...that have certain strings attached. Like a company will sign with a developer and now that developer needs to hire a DEI director and needs to go out and hire consultancy firms to gender balance their staff, or, quite specifically, go out and hire companies like SBI to consult on their writings and do sensitivity readings and changes for that.

And what does this do? Boost their ESG score. It allows them access to that funding. So, ESG is not going away entirely. It's become an evil brand. People are waking up to this. So you have a rebranding going on right now. They're not calling it ESG, but it's still out there. And the money isn't as cheap before, interest rates are up everywhere. But, it's still out there...

How could a studio agree to do this? How can they do something that is so financially devastating for their games? And it's because they're kind of in this situation where that's the money they can get. And you have this self-perpetuating machine...and that's why it's kind of a death spiral that I don't think you can really escape. The only way you can escape it is to make a good game, and if you're already reliant on ESG and you're already reliant on these other funding [sources], it's because your games are too damn expensive to make, you're trapped.

A couple of things: first, I'm sure that the ambulance-chasing lawyers are busily gathering plantiffs for the largest employment discrimation class-action lawsuit in American history, both against Hollywood and the gaming developers.

Second, how did this industry mismanage themselves into a situation where they are literally begging for money to develop such bloated, risky, & expensive games? (No wonder they've had to add not-really-legal gambling and not-that-micro microtransactions into games.) How are they in a situation whereby if a game subsequently fails, the studio skips right over bankruptcy and just shuts down, in what is obviously some sort of grift?

And, when are the marks going to stop lending this industry money? The hoped-for "new audience" for AAA games just isn't there--they're not interested in such a time-consuming hobby, it's too expensive to buy the hardware to get started, etc. So, these are becoming expensive political statements. You can name-call, virtue-signal, and finger-wag all day, but once the audience starts to follow the money, you're in the end game.