#especially in this political moment of trying to “end the DEI madness and restore excellence” speaking as an American

[wardensantoineandevka]

looking at Bluesky, and like, maybe this is just me being defensive, but I don't think doing a long analysis critiquing the dialogue writing of Veilguard as the big failure is the thing to do in reply to a post specifically pointing out that it is worrying and ghoulish that market analysts and bean counters are already justifying this and other layoffs by pointing to Veilguard and other games like Concord and Star Wars and already anticipating it with Assassin's Creed and attributing any failures with these games and their studios to specifically "the broader cultural shift" and "you cannot gamble with or alienate the audience" and "how fast the culture and word-of-mouth moves" and "shifting sensibilities" in an attempt to bow to the ~anti-woke~ crowd and placate them by hastily agreeing with those people on what the TRUE root cause of the failure is: not catering to their fragile white, cis, hetero-normative male sensibilities

like, breaking down quality of dialogue is fully missing the point here, the post is about a much more terrifying and concerning trend about the finance people and folks in suits being afraid of reactionaries and not-so-subtly bending to them and their tantrums in this political climate by specifically and very hastily attributing various games and their failures, real or imagined, to DEI

no amount of stellar and more interesting and better dialogue writing or more thoughtful gameplay loops or less tortured development cycles would change that, not for Veilguard, not for Concord, not for any game. as someone who remembers GamerGate, market analysts and finance number crunchers being so QUICK to soothe and whisper to a SPECIFIC subset of the gaming space, one that is not caring about any of those things actually, with this "oh, it's the shifting culture and their changing tastes" is a terrifying thing to be happening right now in the wake of this. it does not say good things about the next few years in the industry — especially because it's been trend for years already.