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[Sentenza]

nah woke is still winning sadly, yeah the chuds won a couple battles but pretty much every western AAA studio has been infiltrated by woke hires in senior positions. if a woke game fails they just move on to the next one.

They'll go out of business one after another, but yeah, no one should expect these developers to "change".
They are not going to change their mind and they are going to sink the ship rather than concede an inch.

At worst they'll win in the long run. the best case scenario is that they are going to be replaced by new realities.
What's not going to happen is a change of heart on their part. Most of them are simply too invested in their corner of identity politics.
Hell, some of them got into this industry BECAUSE they wanted to push identity politics in the first place.

Why do you people care so much. Just play what you like lol

Yeah, that's exactly what people are doing, in case you missed it.
And the results are showing.

 

[Kotaro]

nah woke is still winning sadly, yeah the chuds won a couple battles but pretty much every western AAA studio has been infiltrated by woke hires in senior positions. if a woke game fails they just move on to the next one.

the feedback loop in gaming industry takes a long time. The games that are released in 2022-2025 were designed and made in 2017-2023, the peak woke era

The games that are designed and made today won't be released until 2027, so we just gotta keep the fight and see how it is in 2-3 years

 

[TintoConCasera]

Happy to finally see the pendulum swinging back.

DEI has to go away. Lets go back to hiring based on merit and having our games being made by competent people instead of diversity hires. Competent devs that are able to optimize the game properly. Competent writers that are able to create compeling worlds and characters. And please lets stop cancelling artists for whatever dumb shit the woke crowd is crying about. Can't we have Jeremy Soule back, please?

 

[Nintendo's Witch]

Are you winning son?

 

[Saber]

I think these people learned the hard way (or perhaps will never learn).

Companies never cared about them. They never cared about anything other than money. In fact they don't even care about us gamers, they just do what they do for cash. In my country at least companies are forced to do charity because laws forces them to do. If there wasn't any law, companies wouldn't give a fuck about charity. I swear if we live on an alternate reality where slavery was a thing they would be the first to jump in.
DEI never had any prospect in money because its all about social brownies and left the companies with incompetent people that hate the very area they work.

 

[Fbh]

Wokeness is 1000% out of style now. Give it 2-3 years for the market to correct itself.

It's going to be interesting to see how games releasing in 3-4 years turn out. The thing with modern AAA games is that they take so long to make that they were often created and designed half a decade ago under different circumstances. Games designed from the ground up with the current reality of the market in mind are still several years away.

Like Ubisoft probably though they had an guaranteed hit with Outlaws. Back when it was starting development The Mandalorian was all the rage, excitement about Star Wars seemed to be reigniting, most social media was still that Era-type echo chamber asking for more girlboss characters, etc.

 

[yurinka]

- Ubisoft is on the brink of bankruptcy

They did shut down several games, studios, etc. in 2023 to have a less bloated company and delayed some other games for further polish. Which caused loses that year as sacrifice for being more profitable in the future.

Just that, other than this they aren't bankrupt at all, they are more than fine and continue being one of the top AAA publishers. They also have many valuable assets like prestige studios and IPs, which some day could sell if needed.

 

[Nickolaidas]

nah woke is still winning sadly, yeah the chuds won a couple battles but pretty much every western AAA studio has been infiltrated by woke hires in senior positions. if a woke game fails they just move on to the next one.

I think Ubisoft will be a huge wake-up call for a lot of companies.

This is politics.
What are we doing here ?
Why are stupid agenda driven political bait threads still a thing and allowed on Gaf.

Very bad look for the gaming community

According to the woke, all video games are political. So does this mean we can't talk about video games anymore on GAF?

PACK IT UP, FOLKS! WE'RE DONE HERE!

 

[Mister Wolf]

They did shut down several games, studios, etc. in 2023 to have a less bloated company and delayed some other games for further polish. Which caused loses that year as sacrifice for being more profitable in the future.

Just that, other than this they aren't bankrupt at all, they are more than fine and continue being one of the top AAA publishers. They also have many valuable assets like prestige studios and IPs, which some day could sell if needed.

They have The Division 3, The Division Mobile, Prince Of Persia Remake, and Splinter Cell Remake in the pipeline. All have the potential to be high sellers. Hopefully they don't let feminism ruin Prince Of Persia.

Upcoming Ubisoft games: Every new Ubisoft game in development

With Shadows delayed to March, these upcoming Ubisoft games are still ones to watch in 2025

www.gamesradar.com

 

[duck_sauce]

I think Ubisoft will be a huge wake-up call for a lot of companies.


According to the woke, all video games are political. So does this mean we can't talk about video games anymore on GAF?

PACK IT UP, FOLKS! WE'RE DONE HERE!

I don’t care. Woke, chuds…

… stay the fuck out of gaming with those stupid agendas. It’s getting tiresome and all you guys achieve is making cringe comments.

 

[Jaybe]

They did shut down several games, studios, etc. in 2023 to have a less bloated company and delayed some other games for further polish. Which caused loses that year as sacrifice for being more profitable in the future.

Just that, other than this they aren't bankrupt at all, they are more than fine and continue being one of the top AAA publishers. They also have many valuable assets like prestige studios and IPs, which some day could sell if needed.

I’m not saying they are bankrupt, I’m not the OP. They have a huge debt problem at nearly 2 billion dollars which is more than their market cap, 1.6 billion, though. And their employee count is massive vs what they bring in vs revenue/income. They have nearly 50% more employees than EA. After AC Shadows, I don’t see what large game is in the horizon for the next two years at least.

 

[Boneless]

What is a "chud"?

 

[FStubbs]

What is a "chud"?

I've never heard the term before either. Still trying to figure out if "DEI" is pronounced with a hard or soft r lol.

 

[Mister Wolf]

What is a "chud"?

It's a mocking way of saying anti-Chad. The opposite end of the totem pole.

 

[Boneless]

It's a mocking way of saying anti-Chad.

So a chud is an ugly and unmasculine man?

 

[SaintALia]

2024 has been a banner for chuds, we got our 'rare chuds win' one after another;
- woke games bombed (Suicide Squad, Concord, SW Outlaws, DA Veilguard, Dustborn, Unknown 9, and many others)
- based games prospered (Stellar Blade, Wukong, Helldiver 2, Space Marine 2)

Looks like the momentum continues in 2025. In latest major developments in war against wokeness
- Chinese-developed Marvel Rivals is doing great numbers with its traditionally designed characters (masculine men, sexy feminine females)
- BIG NEWS: Meta completely nuked all their DEI programs and Facebook/Instagram dumped censorship and wokeness completely
- Amazon also cancelled many of their DEI programs
- Ubisoft is on the brink of bankruptcy and AC: Shadows delayed once again. Will Ubisoft even survive before Shadows released??
- CI Games, Lord of the Fallen studio, said they will not implement anymore DEI elements in their games, because they basically said 'go woke go broke'

With all these recent developments, Do other game developers still not get the message???? is Naughty Dog still going to stick to their bald dude female character? is Fable still going to keep their butt ugly female character?? they're risking hundreds of millions of dollars, even when they already know what the outcome will be

DEI wokeness is dying, chuds are winning. Adjust or DIE

Those games didn't bomb for 'DEI' reasons and those games weren't successful for their elimination of them.

None of those games mentioned(sans Helldivers) are the best selling games of the year(top ten in units or money).

Best selling video games of the year 2024
EA Sports College Football
Call of Duty: Black OPs 6
Helldivers 2
DragonBall Sparking Zero
Call Of Duty MW3
Madden NFL 25
EA Sports FC 25
EA Sports MVP Bundle
Elden Ring
Dragon's Dogma 2


Your usual suspects occupies most of the list and this of course excludes any Nintendo game because Nintendo does not release digital numbers.


Bolded doesn't even make sense either:
Marvel Rivals is working off traditional designs for heroes.
Meta saves money by nuking that part of them, it's also to cozy up to Trump, it has nothing to do with 'wokeness', it's business.
Same thing as Meta. Business (Neither Meta nor Amazon care about DEI or environemental protections to begin with anyway, but it was always good marketing, until it's not)
Ubisoft has a shit ton of problems, DEI is the very least of it. If you think Ubisoft were bad before, just wait until someone like EA get a hold of them, or private equity.
Meat to the gullible, which seems to be working.


It's still amazing to me that for all the shit the game industry has going on, Microtransactions up the wazoo, online requirements for single player games, shit working conditions for game devs and crunch, mass firings trying to squeeze out money for quarter results to look good, GAAS getting shoved constantly into our faces, and so much more, what people want to latch onto as the main culprit for enshitification in the games industry is.....'wokeness'. Just so fucking dumb to me.

 

[RCU005]

Imaging having an accident and the fireman tells you: You got yourself in the wrong place (specially when it's obviously not your fault).

Or the fireman looking for people that looks like him so they feel safe.

Oh shit, so now even rescuing people is going to be DEI shit.

 

[Mister Wolf]

So a chud is an ugly and unmasculine man?

Yes, a loser male. A beta, a incel, etc. Bottom tier. They are all synonymous insults.

 

[Trilobit]

As with any ideologies they don't easily disappear. Proponents of wokeness have been very vocal and aggressive with how they try to enforce their views on society and they'll like hold on to them, but try to be more subtle about it in 2025 and forward (just look at SBI that still has plenty of work). I loathe woke stuff, but in 2024 we only had the first decent push against it. It hasn't been defeated in any way unfortunately, but it's good that more and more people are becoming aware of it and how corrosive it is to a society. I don't give a shit about people who call me an exhausting anti-woke or chud or whatever as wokeness has been pushed for around ten years now and only in this past year has there been a proper reaction against it. So why would I care about what someone thinks about something that has only been going on for a relatively short time? The culture war began a long time ago, but now that the other side has become aware of it it's suddenly important that they become quiet and stop resisting?

 

[Nickolaidas]

… stay the fuck out of gaming with those stupid agendas.

That ship has sailed for almost eight years now.

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

While this is true (in terms of homogenizing AAA), certainly there has been large volumes of jet fuel dropped upon the situation.

I 100% agree. I was just pointing out this downfall started before the Woke/Chud argument. Gaming mostly peaked during the Wii360/Ps3/wii u gen

 

[Silver Wattle]

nvm

 

[FalsettoVibe]

"Whoever wins.....we loose"
This is legit perfect.

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

the feedback loop in gaming industry takes a long time. The games that are released in 2022-2025 were designed and made in 2017-2023, the peak woke era

The games that are designed and made today won't be released until 2027, so we just gotta keep the fight and see how it is in 2-3 years

Good news is that Asia is still making games the old fashioned way, and no one could stop any of us from just play Asian game titles. We are not playing less games; we are just changing course in where we get our games from. China, Korea and Japan all have their own great studios making great games.

 

[nkarafo]

I cannot believe this isn't satire.

 

[KiteGr]

It's a sad situation indeed.
The message behind woke was supposed to be good, but it was thoughtlessly and soulessly implemented that it was obvious that we were dealing with extremists, and it was taboo to try and stop them.

This culture war shit has some of y'all terminally online.

Anti woke are up there with vegans and crossfitters.

The games you listed as failures was because they sucked.

Way to many and with very real needle moving influence to be just a few loud annoying people. Something obviously happened here.

I don't know if noticed, but the whole nerdom suddenly died in the span of 4 years. There used to be franchises with millions of loyal fans, and suddenly they are almost all dead.
People haven't all "grown up" simultaneously. Something killed them. Something like a movement or mind virus that hit simultaneously all the ip owners and make them swift the target audience from the original to a few activists that insult the original.

One doesn't just kill the biggest franchises in existence without rustling some jimmies, so now all Nerds hate wokes with a burning passion.

People wouldn't be so angry if the movement influenced just some newer IPs.
They wouldn't be so angry if all we got was Snowflake and Safe space. Instead we also got Gay Superman and Pregnant Joker.
That's why people are angry.
Add the constant gag attempts and hit articles of the mainstream media all those years, and the whole thing just exploded.

I look at it this way.

There is no shortage of non-woke games. The problem is that chuds shit on them just as hard as they do DEI-infested stuff.

Until the chuds start showing some love to these AA games, we're going to watch the slow death of woke AAA and the slow death of quality non-woke AA studios.

Explore AA publishers and buy their games, those are the studios we want to level up to the AAA world.

There have been always hidden undiscovered gems in all media entertainment.
It's irrelevant to the woke implosion.

Just because you won some battles in one year doesn't mean that woke/DEI is dying especially in gaming. This stuff has been going on for nearly a decade and has become the norm in all of the AAA gaming companies so even if you end the programs you still have a decade of employee hires in those companies.

I don't know if you noticed, but with very few exceptions those DEI infested companies aren't doing very well right now. Those poor companies have some serious clean up to do to survive or suffer the fate of the rest. They did it to them self's.
Should they had stayed neutral and truly hired people from all aspects of life based on merit, then they would had at least known that people do not like to be imposed each weirdo's weird pronouns.
Instead, in their attempt to artificially rise their ESG score, they hired activists that demand all the games to be filled with transvestites, girl bosses and black vikings and throw a tantrum whenever someone makes a fictional woman feminine.

 

[MiguelItUp]

Developers just need to stay passionate and make good/great games. If everything comes from a true place of passion and hard work it will show in the product in many ways. The opposite will do the same and usually fail.

All this other silly stuff shouldn't matter as much as people want it to. We should just want good/great games from good/great developers.

 

[Kerotan]

Change takes time. You have to remember a lot of games which are woke and releasing now were made a different time. Being a strong white man is cool again but that won't show up hugely in Western gaming for another few years. The blue haired diversity candidates have embedded themselves in these companies like tics and will take a while to clear out.

Ultimately the owner's of these companies care about money and the diversity project proved costly. We just want normal cool games without forced political messaging.

 

[TintoConCasera]

stay the fuck out of gaming with those stupid agendas.

You should have told this to developers many years ago. Don't put the blame on the consumers that are fed up with this shit.

 

[TGO]

Anti woke are up there with vegans and crossfitters.

The games you listed as failures was because they sucked.

So you're Pro Woke

 

[winjer]

I just hope the industry can go back to normal, where games are made to be fun, and not to be political manifestos, for whatever side.
I just want to play games and have fun. Not be indoctrinated.

 

[RavageX]

What happened is gaming became too mainstream. Too much attention on it now that "artists" and "celebs" think its cool that they are associated with the hobby, and the people that like those people think its cool too. Now you have "influencers" who do nothing but make videos and claim to be gamers, and you have companies catering to these people. Why? Cause for some reason, gamers watch these people.

Now you have everyday joes and jills who are being put IN games because they "influence" gamers. WTF is that? Really?

Add the fact that so called Woke became a thing, and JUST LIKE GAMING ended up mainstream. Once that happened, the actual meaning became manipulated into something else by social media....end result is what we see now.

Since social media was pushing this new version of Woke, of course the marketers or whoever follows trends said, "HEY, this is blowing up. It will look good if we start focusing on this, and we will get rich. Hell the game/movie/whatever doesn't have to be good. It just needs X/Y/Z in it." Of course this was mostly ok at first but just like anything else it gets over done.

Meanwhile the average person who likes games as a hobby is thinking, "What the hell have they done to one of my favorite pastimes?" This happens with other things too, sports...movies, cars even.

Now, you can't even have a different race, or a woman in a game/movie without someone yelling WOKE. Yeah I get it, no one wants to see a Mrs. Freeze, I don't either. I don't really want to see character designs like that little asian boy in that Naughty Dog game. There really isn't a proper balance anymore (IMO). Closest thing to balance has been games with a character creator, and even then you have to more than likely suffer a poorly designed character made JUST to satisfy people that are in on the new version of Woke.

Jeez I sound like a crazy old man ranting. See what this does to people?

 

[nkarafo]

What happened is gaming became too mainstream.

This is the root of everything that gets ruined eventually.

 

[TintoConCasera]

This is the root of everything that gets ruined eventually.

Yeah. It makes it so everything has to appeal to everyone, which results in dull and soulless products. I miss when this was mostly a hobby for nerds lol.

 

[Ozriel]

But woke games Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hogwarts Legacy outsold everything in the OP aside from Wukong

 

[EN250]

The chuds and the wokes are two sides of the same fucking coin, they feed each other in this endless "culture war" bs, where everyone not being a zealot siding for one faction or the other is marked as the "enemy" and gets dragged to it even if the rest of the normal living world, with its own damned problem, wants nothing to do with it

Can't we go back to times where the American democrat/republican party and the European right wing/left wing politics had shit to do with entertainment at all, so people in the rest of the world don't have to deal with americans + europeans getting their fee-fees hurt, one way or another?

I understand why one rised as the counter for the other, since leftards are the loudest minority bitching every damn second of their lives, but you don't have go full obnoxious as them in order to "fight" them

 

[Nickolaidas]

You should have told this to developers many years ago. Don't put the blame on the consumers that are fed up with this shit.

FUCKING.

THIS.

I swear to God, it's like some people don't realize there is a thing called 'consequence'.

 

[Fake]

They will double down.

 

[llien]

- BIG NEWS: Meta completely nuked all their DEI programs and Facebook/Instagram dumped censorship and wokeness completely

Zuckerburger has stopped "fact checking" in the US, not Europe, resorting to "community notes" instead.
Probably to settle with Trumpking's oversize arse, and also to cut the costs.

There is 0 evidence that DEI grip on the management is weakening.

I wish it was, but it isn't.

 

[llien]

… stay the fuck out of gaming with those stupid agendas. It’s getting tiresome and all you guys achieve is making cringe comments.

Please, tell me about the "chud" company selling "chad-ism" to game developers.
Here is "Sweet Baby Inc" for you, selling DEI "expertise".
Lead by a lady who often wished that protagonists would look like... her.

 

[Imtjnotu]

2024 has been a banner for chuds, we got our 'rare chuds win' one after another;
- woke games bombed (Suicide Squad, Concord, SW Outlaws, DA Veilguard, Dustborn, Unknown 9, and many others)
- based games prospered (Stellar Blade, Wukong, Helldiver 2, Space Marine 2)

Looks like the momentum continues in 2025. In latest major developments in war against wokeness
- Chinese-developed Marvel Rivals is doing great numbers with its traditionally designed characters (masculine men, sexy feminine females)
- BIG NEWS: Meta completely nuked all their DEI programs and Facebook/Instagram dumped censorship and wokeness completely
- Amazon also cancelled many of their DEI programs
- Ubisoft is on the brink of bankruptcy and AC: Shadows delayed once again. Will Ubisoft even survive before Shadows released??
- CI Games, Lord of the Fallen studio, said they will not implement anymore DEI elements in their games, because they basically said 'go woke go broke'

With all these recent developments, Do other game developers still not get the message???? is Naughty Dog still going to stick to their bald dude female character? is Fable still going to keep their butt ugly female character?? they're risking hundreds of millions of dollars, even when they already know what the outcome will be

DEI wokeness is dying, chuds are winning. Adjust or DIE

How much fox News are you watching

 

[SmokedMeat]

Sorry but I’m an adult man, and we don’t do Gen Z internet slang.

What the fuck is a Chud?

 

[TintoConCasera]

Sorry but I’m an adult man, and we don’t do Gen Z internet slang.

What the fuck is a Chud?

It's like an incel basement-dweller who's also right-wing. It's meant to be an insult, but I think the actual chuds have adopted the term as an equivalent of non-woke.

Or something. I dunno.

 

[NahaNago]

I don't know if you noticed, but with very few exceptions those DEI infested companies aren't doing very well right now. Those poor companies have some serious clean up to do to survive or suffer the fate of the rest. They did it to them self's.
Should they had stayed neutral and truly hired people from all aspects of life based on merit, then they would had at least known that people do not like to be imposed each weirdo's weird pronouns.
Instead, in their attempt to artificially rise their ESG score, they hired activists that demand all the games to be filled with transvestites, girl bosses and black vikings and throw a tantrum whenever someone makes a fictional woman feminine.

Like you said they hired activists, but they also were pushing those activists up into positions of leadership. So even if the company isn't doing well, these activists are still going to push their cultural/political positions no matter what.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Bend Studios presents:

DEI's Gone.

 

[SmokedMeat]

It's like an incel basement-dweller who's also right-wing. It's meant to be an insult, but I think the actual chuds have adopted the term as an equivalent of non-woke.

Or something. I dunno.

Thanks. It feels like both left and right extremes bring nothing but political bullshit to this hobby.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Thanks. It feels like both left and right extremes bring nothing but political bullshit to this hobby.

It's the pendulum thing. We've gotten tons of far-left stuff in games, so now you see the far-right making a push on the other direction.

I wish there was no pendulum at all and all we had was just games that focus on being fun.

That said, I'll be happy the day DEI is gone because it hurts videogames by incentivating developers to hire untalented people just to meet some diversity quotas. But we also have to be careful and not swing the pendulum too far on the other direction. Having game studios being racist or homophobe wouldn't be good either. Everyone deserves a chance, so long as they are willing to make an effort and have the talent to do so.

 

[Kotaro]

Good news is that Asia is still making games the old fashioned way, and no one could stop any of us from just play Asian game titles. We are not playing less games; we are just changing course in where we get our games from. China, Korea and Japan all have their own great studios making great games.

Yup, in the meantime Asian games are more than enough for us, let the Western industry correct itself

 

[TintoConCasera]

Yup, in the meantime Asian games are more than enough for us, let the Western industry correct itself

Some asian companies have been falling into the DEI pipeline as well, hiring consultancy companies like Sweet Baby or Hit Detection.

Hopefully they are able to see how those are affecting western companies and backpedal before it's too late.

 

[Kotaro]

How much fox News are you watching

I only use Twitter/X nowadays

Thanks. It feels like both left and right extremes bring nothing but political bullshit to this hobby.

Thing is we're not even far-right, we never demand conservatives/nationalist games, we just want games the way they were, for example: masculine man or sexy/beautiful woman as protagonist..... none of these ugly gender-confused, gender-fluid, androgynous crap