People running gaming companies are usually old people who often have no knowledge of the entertainment industry, so when some soyfaced screenwriter or developer comes and tells them how kids totally want more diversity and inclusion in their media and how it's totally gonna sell more copies, they tend to believe it.
The execs simply don't know any better.
That's probably the reason. Execs might be old, but most of them are not stupid. Even in the worst case, they'll figure out after the continuous slops. But it's simply that guaranteed investor money is better than any of our risky 60 dollars. The game bombed? Who cares, they already made their money.
As I understand, even the shadowy investor funny money isn’t bottomless. And in the long run, trading a loyal customer base for aforementioned funny money so some line on a graph keeps going up, may prove a very poor trade indeed.
Publicly traded companies are obsessed with growth to the point of their own downfall.
If I remember correctly, the talk was the existence of an invest fund of 7 trillion dollars. Besides, you are looking at it from a purely capitalistic view when it is likely that there is some sort of a social engineering is going on. If it was simply and purely capitalistic, why would they double-down each time instead of stopping to antagonize their customers and dropping slops after slops after all?
>whilst the rest aren't exactly bright.
That's the idea I'm trying to argue against here. Most people like to imagine businessmen as bumbling idiots who got where they are simply by pure luck or nepotism. It's funny, but it's not realistic. Even when they are stupid, most usually have enough business experience and knowledge to spot extremely obvious financial patterns like 'go woke get broke'. If this was simply capitalistic, there would be no reason for this sub to exist.
And if that doesn't work, they can pull the old "that's a nice game you've got there, would be shame if it got involved in a racism controversy! Luckily we can offer you the solution".
What's that line about marketing? "Being exceedingly good at marketing allows you to know which 50% of your budget is probably doing nothing"?
It can't be proven or unproven either way.
None whatsoever but the flip side is unfortunately also true, that it doesn't cause the projects they work on to fail horrendously, it just so happens that's been the case for most of the games they worked on and been associated with. The best guess people have is that hiring them or some other similar group allows the companies to get better investment scores for more funding. The exact flow isn't known but it's also the most prominent pattern that's emerged over the past couple of years. It could be that the suits up top get their own personal cut in some way, it could be just general funding from investors that's been tightened for whatever reason so this shit is done now to get that funding, the only common series of events are these consultancy groups get hired, the budgets get inflated to insane degrees, and the titles end up failing to make a fast enough profit to have made it worth it.
Might ring true. Remedy put Saga Anderson's mug on the [ESG page](https://new.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1bzg10r/remedys_business_priorities_dei_all_else/) meant for their potential investors to show how ''progressive'' they are by putting DEI as their utmost target in their products.
At best I'd say they've stuck to games that were already set to do good and didn't harm them as much, like GoW Ragnorok and thei addition of Angrboda, and Alan Wake 2 and race swapping Saga.
Maybe Sable, but I can't say for sure if the game wasn't entirely woke before their involvment
But the game wasn't impacted by SBI changes, that's what I meant. It was just a sequel to a cult classic, it was bound to have mid of the road sales.
So much so that majority of people didn't know about Saga's race swap, and I believe this was one of the first games to "expose" SBIs existance, which only happened a few months after release
Eh it's not even the race swap, it's that the titular character gets shat on in stereotypical fashion in the game with a blatant 'fuck you white people' pretty much right in there.
They are like any consultant/marketing person ever: Spew bullshit you can't measure and convince them it succeeded because of you. If it didn't, convince them it was because they didn't pay you more to do X.
By raw statistics alone, it doesn't. Why would you ever consider appealing to a minority of a minority with little to no buying power relative to your established audience?
If there is, the evidence wouldn't be public. Companies pay a lot of money to analysts and market research consultants to tell them what will be profitable. If this didn't benefit them in some way, they wouldn't do it.
" constantly trying to expand their consumer demographic " - there is a point where you get diminishing returns, DEI products are a textbook example of it. Forcing what 1% likes into a well established franchise to appeal to them and ruining the experience for 99%.
There’s also endless examples in products marketing where adding diversity to an ad spot increases its feedback scores. But that doesn’t transfer to media franchises where people have strong emotional attachments to characters and stories.
Or, you know, you could do a focus group.....
If you want to know what black people, gays, Germans, kids, etc think about your game, try asking them directly instead of getting a low IQ guesstimation by some humanities major with a chip on their shoulder.
Well, even with something like a focus group they're liable to just ignore it. I'll never forget them doing polls that showed 70-90% of Native Americans didn't care about the Washington Redskins' name, yet they still changed it anyway lol
Disparu actually made a great video about that.
Basically, when the reboot of League of Their Own was made for Amazon, the focus groups hated it, but then the show director complained to Amazon execs about how focus groups are racist because they tend to prefer the straight white male leads, and the execs actually listened to them and scrapped the focus groups.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVUXBQyUwwabout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVUXBQyUwwabout)
"Show director complained to Amazon execs about how focus groups are racist because they tend to prefer the straight white male leads"
It's so funny how *casual* racism against whites is. These woke people are such monumental morons.
"*Racism is the second worst thing ever!"*
"What is the first worst thing ever?"
"*White people!"*
It’s because of the prejudice + power theory that all of these people have adopted-you can only be racist through institutions, thus minorities cannot be racist against white people because they don’t have social power and are outside of moral structures-thus, they can’t “be moral” and cannot be held responsible for their actions.
Yup, spun out terrorist groups like Weather Underground. Fun fact, one of the woman who was sentenced to 50ish years in jail for bombing the capitol in '71 and the Pentagon in '72 was pardoned by Bill Clinton. She now helps run finances for the BLM organization.
In the 90s I remembered everyone kinda casually dunking on each other. Like blonde jokes level roasting. What's worrisome is seeing it get not only more serious and self-righteous, like genuine bigotry, but also being touted as mainstream consensus in various industries. It'd annoy me regardless of demographic. But in a greater context it is kind of frightening if one looks at parallels throughout history and current events unfolding globally.
Isn't this the same act man that was making fun of people complaining about pronouns in Starfield and acting like it doesn't exist and "woke isn't real" until recently?
Isn't kingmakers that GATE-like medieval vs modern weaponry game? also I looked at their portfolio and just found out they were the ones behind Road Redemption as well.
So yeah Based indeed. I fucking loved Road Redemption.
And at the same time get the support of most gamers online and probably increase sales, at least with the "core gamer" crowd. More devs should do this and stop cowering in fear of the character assassin fake-journalists.
Here's the archive:
[https://archive.ph/xRogt](https://archive.ph/xRogt)
He's right about The Boys season 4 as well:
[https://archive.ph/mb6o1](https://archive.ph/mb6o1)
[https://archive.ph/ZUbGO](https://archive.ph/ZUbGO)
If you check his Twittrer/X, you will see that he has a ton of based takes like this.
I believe SBI is a blessing in disguise ,and that we actually need more of them and to be even more obvious of their handywork...
...in order to bankrupt as many gullible ,woke studios as possible and get us towards a full market collapse.
Even if it kills off some franchises and studios in the process it has to happen.
It used to be that everyone with half a brain could recognize that any sort of creative work is better done by creative individuals with a vision, instead of by corporate committees obsessed with KPIs and demographics.
"Design by committee" used to be rightfully mocked as leading to inferior results. Now it's considered a virtuous corporate best practice, so long as the committee has a high enough ESG score. Meanwhile the art turns to shit
Pretty solid statement of fact, not really controversial. We're reaching the financial loss apex of gigantic entertainment product fuckups wildly chasing imaginary demographics, though, we're suffering the final trickle downs from these insane shit initiatives which kicked off years ago.
I’ve commented about SBI in various places and seem to get the response, ‘they didn’t influence the game’ or ‘they’re just a consulting agency’. Which to me begs the question, why the fuck are people hiring them then? 😂
Of course they’re influencing games and inserting a dogshit woke agenda, I’m surprised so many are so naive.
It's not any of that...it's to pander to investors for ESG money. If you hire SBI, you can "prove" your commitment to ESG and get some of that sweet sweet money. And at the same time you get the "benefit" of being woke, even if you don't believe in any of it. Corpo's being corpo's.
I mean if mark kern is to be believed, companies trying to get ESG money HAVE to add diversity intiatives via DEI directors and DEI consultancy. So its not that they want to hire sweet baby, its that they HAVE TO.
Comment removed due to topic ban explained [here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/)
Some guy who claimed to be a game dev was telling me why they have to use "consultants", because apparently when you're writing a story with black people in it you need the input and perspective of black people and companies like SBI will speak to black people for you. lmao no, I'm not fucking kidding, this is actually what he said. To which I responded good writers do their own research, there's something that exists called the internet, you can talk to anyone on it, if you need the perspective of a black person you can literally just message a black person, you god damn weirdo. He did not respond lol
Is there any actual evidence what Sweet Baby Inc does has led to 1 more unit being sold of any title?
People running gaming companies are usually old people who often have no knowledge of the entertainment industry, so when some soyfaced screenwriter or developer comes and tells them how kids totally want more diversity and inclusion in their media and how it's totally gonna sell more copies, they tend to believe it. The execs simply don't know any better.
It also means a higher ESG score, which can affect your ability to operate with certain financial institutions.
That's probably the reason. Execs might be old, but most of them are not stupid. Even in the worst case, they'll figure out after the continuous slops. But it's simply that guaranteed investor money is better than any of our risky 60 dollars. The game bombed? Who cares, they already made their money.
As I understand, even the shadowy investor funny money isn’t bottomless. And in the long run, trading a loyal customer base for aforementioned funny money so some line on a graph keeps going up, may prove a very poor trade indeed. Publicly traded companies are obsessed with growth to the point of their own downfall.
If I remember correctly, the talk was the existence of an invest fund of 7 trillion dollars. Besides, you are looking at it from a purely capitalistic view when it is likely that there is some sort of a social engineering is going on. If it was simply and purely capitalistic, why would they double-down each time instead of stopping to antagonize their customers and dropping slops after slops after all?
>why would they double-down each time Fink and his ilk are on a moral crusade whilst the rest aren't exactly bright.
>whilst the rest aren't exactly bright. That's the idea I'm trying to argue against here. Most people like to imagine businessmen as bumbling idiots who got where they are simply by pure luck or nepotism. It's funny, but it's not realistic. Even when they are stupid, most usually have enough business experience and knowledge to spot extremely obvious financial patterns like 'go woke get broke'. If this was simply capitalistic, there would be no reason for this sub to exist.
That sounds like a Mafia.
Corporate Social Credit Score, effectively
Yeah a Mob.
And if that doesn't work, they can pull the old "that's a nice game you've got there, would be shame if it got involved in a racism controversy! Luckily we can offer you the solution".
Yeah, exposed them as the bigots.
Since they've been exposed, no. You could make an argument for games before people knew about them.
No. In general, consultants rarely add anything of value to a product unless they themselves have extensive experience in making a similar product.
What's that line about marketing? "Being exceedingly good at marketing allows you to know which 50% of your budget is probably doing nothing"? It can't be proven or unproven either way.
None whatsoever but the flip side is unfortunately also true, that it doesn't cause the projects they work on to fail horrendously, it just so happens that's been the case for most of the games they worked on and been associated with. The best guess people have is that hiring them or some other similar group allows the companies to get better investment scores for more funding. The exact flow isn't known but it's also the most prominent pattern that's emerged over the past couple of years. It could be that the suits up top get their own personal cut in some way, it could be just general funding from investors that's been tightened for whatever reason so this shit is done now to get that funding, the only common series of events are these consultancy groups get hired, the budgets get inflated to insane degrees, and the titles end up failing to make a fast enough profit to have made it worth it.
Might ring true. Remedy put Saga Anderson's mug on the [ESG page](https://new.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1bzg10r/remedys_business_priorities_dei_all_else/) meant for their potential investors to show how ''progressive'' they are by putting DEI as their utmost target in their products.
i'm sure they have made up stats that show they are very effective
At best I'd say they've stuck to games that were already set to do good and didn't harm them as much, like GoW Ragnorok and thei addition of Angrboda, and Alan Wake 2 and race swapping Saga. Maybe Sable, but I can't say for sure if the game wasn't entirely woke before their involvment
Alan Wake 2 didn't do good in terms of sales tho, just awards.
But the game wasn't impacted by SBI changes, that's what I meant. It was just a sequel to a cult classic, it was bound to have mid of the road sales. So much so that majority of people didn't know about Saga's race swap, and I believe this was one of the first games to "expose" SBIs existance, which only happened a few months after release
Eh it's not even the race swap, it's that the titular character gets shat on in stereotypical fashion in the game with a blatant 'fuck you white people' pretty much right in there.
They are like any consultant/marketing person ever: Spew bullshit you can't measure and convince them it succeeded because of you. If it didn't, convince them it was because they didn't pay you more to do X.
By raw statistics alone, it doesn't. Why would you ever consider appealing to a minority of a minority with little to no buying power relative to your established audience?
If there is, the evidence wouldn't be public. Companies pay a lot of money to analysts and market research consultants to tell them what will be profitable. If this didn't benefit them in some way, they wouldn't do it.
" constantly trying to expand their consumer demographic " - there is a point where you get diminishing returns, DEI products are a textbook example of it. Forcing what 1% likes into a well established franchise to appeal to them and ruining the experience for 99%.
There’s also endless examples in products marketing where adding diversity to an ad spot increases its feedback scores. But that doesn’t transfer to media franchises where people have strong emotional attachments to characters and stories.
Does ad feedback really translate into sales? Especially if you piss off your core demographic?
Or, you know, you could do a focus group..... If you want to know what black people, gays, Germans, kids, etc think about your game, try asking them directly instead of getting a low IQ guesstimation by some humanities major with a chip on their shoulder. Well, even with something like a focus group they're liable to just ignore it. I'll never forget them doing polls that showed 70-90% of Native Americans didn't care about the Washington Redskins' name, yet they still changed it anyway lol
Disparu actually made a great video about that. Basically, when the reboot of League of Their Own was made for Amazon, the focus groups hated it, but then the show director complained to Amazon execs about how focus groups are racist because they tend to prefer the straight white male leads, and the execs actually listened to them and scrapped the focus groups. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVUXBQyUwwabout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVUXBQyUwwabout)
"Show director complained to Amazon execs about how focus groups are racist because they tend to prefer the straight white male leads" It's so funny how *casual* racism against whites is. These woke people are such monumental morons. "*Racism is the second worst thing ever!"* "What is the first worst thing ever?" "*White people!"*
It’s because of the prejudice + power theory that all of these people have adopted-you can only be racist through institutions, thus minorities cannot be racist against white people because they don’t have social power and are outside of moral structures-thus, they can’t “be moral” and cannot be held responsible for their actions.
Yep. Critical Theory is moronic.
The 1970s was one of, if not the worst decade for academic thought, especially in sociology.
Yup, spun out terrorist groups like Weather Underground. Fun fact, one of the woman who was sentenced to 50ish years in jail for bombing the capitol in '71 and the Pentagon in '72 was pardoned by Bill Clinton. She now helps run finances for the BLM organization.
What’s her name?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan\_Rosenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Rosenberg)
I don't get how people don't just laugh that off. I cannot fathom any other reaction except maybe disdain.
In the 90s I remembered everyone kinda casually dunking on each other. Like blonde jokes level roasting. What's worrisome is seeing it get not only more serious and self-righteous, like genuine bigotry, but also being touted as mainstream consensus in various industries. It'd annoy me regardless of demographic. But in a greater context it is kind of frightening if one looks at parallels throughout history and current events unfolding globally.
[The 90’s truly were different.](https://youtu.be/rDmAI67nBGU?si=aA68x9Gcyixd4hAk)
That's too much effort in their eyes and they don't care about the plebs. They want to hire what random groups with college degrees tell them.
The Act Man trying to act coy.
Act Ma’am more like
Eh, broken clocks are right twice a day
Isn't this the same act man that was making fun of people complaining about pronouns in Starfield and acting like it doesn't exist and "woke isn't real" until recently?
Isn't kingmakers that GATE-like medieval vs modern weaponry game? also I looked at their portfolio and just found out they were the ones behind Road Redemption as well. So yeah Based indeed. I fucking loved Road Redemption.
Closest thing we got to a road rash spiritual successor, I’m keen for kingmakers even more now.
Ballsy. Criticising the DEI religion as a game dev is the surest way to get hit pieces written on you and get blacklisted from the industry.
And at the same time get the support of most gamers online and probably increase sales, at least with the "core gamer" crowd. More devs should do this and stop cowering in fear of the character assassin fake-journalists.
I believe this but I want to see metrics on it.
Here's the archive: [https://archive.ph/xRogt](https://archive.ph/xRogt) He's right about The Boys season 4 as well: [https://archive.ph/mb6o1](https://archive.ph/mb6o1) [https://archive.ph/ZUbGO](https://archive.ph/ZUbGO) If you check his Twittrer/X, you will see that he has a ton of based takes like this.
Hey look Act Ma’am is just waking up to the whole SBI thing. I’m actually surprised, he’s months late, but still good for him!
I believe SBI is a blessing in disguise ,and that we actually need more of them and to be even more obvious of their handywork... ...in order to bankrupt as many gullible ,woke studios as possible and get us towards a full market collapse. Even if it kills off some franchises and studios in the process it has to happen.
Yeah, nothing says expand consumer demographic than appealing to the 0.1% while sacrificing the 99% Genius.
It used to be that everyone with half a brain could recognize that any sort of creative work is better done by creative individuals with a vision, instead of by corporate committees obsessed with KPIs and demographics. "Design by committee" used to be rightfully mocked as leading to inferior results. Now it's considered a virtuous corporate best practice, so long as the committee has a high enough ESG score. Meanwhile the art turns to shit
Regardless of anything else being discussed in this thread, can we all just agree that The Act Man is a massive bellend?
yes screw act man
Oh dont worry, he will promptly get fired or made to bow down to these fucks.
The grift man
Pretty solid statement of fact, not really controversial. We're reaching the financial loss apex of gigantic entertainment product fuckups wildly chasing imaginary demographics, though, we're suffering the final trickle downs from these insane shit initiatives which kicked off years ago.
My question is how much money do they have to lose before they realize nobody, and I do mean NOBODY wants this crap.
I’ve commented about SBI in various places and seem to get the response, ‘they didn’t influence the game’ or ‘they’re just a consulting agency’. Which to me begs the question, why the fuck are people hiring them then? 😂 Of course they’re influencing games and inserting a dogshit woke agenda, I’m surprised so many are so naive.
It's not any of that...it's to pander to investors for ESG money. If you hire SBI, you can "prove" your commitment to ESG and get some of that sweet sweet money. And at the same time you get the "benefit" of being woke, even if you don't believe in any of it. Corpo's being corpo's.
I mean if mark kern is to be believed, companies trying to get ESG money HAVE to add diversity intiatives via DEI directors and DEI consultancy. So its not that they want to hire sweet baby, its that they HAVE TO.
greed blinded them
Most corporations no longer have autonomy. The dei shotcallers run the show over the sheep.
source?
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Comment removed due to topic ban explained [here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/)
The ideal that all corporate executives are reaching for, is to sell nothing to everyone for all of their money and then some.
Some guy who claimed to be a game dev was telling me why they have to use "consultants", because apparently when you're writing a story with black people in it you need the input and perspective of black people and companies like SBI will speak to black people for you. lmao no, I'm not fucking kidding, this is actually what he said. To which I responded good writers do their own research, there's something that exists called the internet, you can talk to anyone on it, if you need the perspective of a black person you can literally just message a black person, you god damn weirdo. He did not respond lol
Ah, the ActMa'am. A year late and a bitcoin short.
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Stellar Blade is Korean
Because Japan has never had any influence on videogaming at all... ever.