I see people referencing ESG more and more these days and there seems to be a blatant and undeniable link now between shit, poorly disguised unreal asset flips which even the big studios are doing and them running off a check list of cringey woke talking points or characters that almost always look the same.
If we think about it all titles now seem to follow this type of pattern:
. Blatant Unreal world environment assets that they don't even try to hide or edit properly anymore
. Speed tree ( Possibly the most favourite overused tool of a big studio I love to frequently reference for doubters )
. Usually the most basic third person character controller you've ever seen
. Black woman with afro or dreadlocks heavily featured, usually with a white female in tow and several male background characters
. Possibly characters lifted straight out of metahumans? Difficult to tell, can't confirm properly as of yet but they all look suspiciously similar in terms of fidelity and the setup - see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuVqfasT90
This isn't what I'm interested in despite the lengthy post, all of these moves by big studios have one thing in common. That's to reduce production time, reliance on a large art team which would have been necessary back in the day and general running costs of maintaining a big studio.
No, what's activating the old weaponised autism on this issue we're facing as gamers is what is truly driving this? Are we looking at a situation where we're going to have something akin to big studios turning into zombie companies that maintain a skeleton crew of do nothing diversity hire employees while you have one or two real designers doing all the work in the background? It seems that if the ESG subsidies are as massive as people seem to think it could well be worthwhile for CEOs to operate their companies as minimally as possible and simply pocket this government money as long as they like and because it's allegedly Blackrock. Much like how hotels are being paid ridiculous amounts of money to house migrants rather than operate themselves as a legitimate business with infinite government money the business owners aren't going to give a shit about what happens as long as they get to keep pocketing their half a million in the bank every year and leave the community to rot.
This means that they can and will keep producing infinite amounts of shit at very little cost and even if gamers all get mad and jump ship it's not going to matter and they will still keep churning this out every year as long as they maintain their diversity quotas and keep getting money.
Yes everybody, I am going down a major conspiracy rabbit hole with this and my brain has been ticking away. I want to know if there are any kind of financial numbers or reports buried deep in the way that potentially supports all of this cringe mediocrity.
It's really simple, ESG enables them not to care about appealing to a consumer base because they are guaranteed money coming from ESG backing companies, like Blackrock, for the low cost of hiring a few fags and coloureds (just because they use pretty words doesn't mean it ain't racist).
The problem is, what happens when it runs out which is the current issue looming now. They have effectively driven away their legacy consumer base, the ones they appeal to don't buy their games only go 'yas queen' on social media or more likely complain you're not submissive enough and your game looks so shit it's unlikely to bring in new players.
The ESG is a leash that these companies either don't care or are too stupid to realise they are collaring themselves to. Because if the owner doesn't feed them anymore they're fucked.
When everyone involved are activists no one cares about end products or the company, the leash is part of the goal. ESG is just a carrot on a stick to justify their activism. Like locust they leave from one company to another once their projects die.
Yeah, that's something I find really fascinating, I want to get into the detail of it though and see if we can nab receipts on these bastards so we can educate other gamers properly on what they're up to. From the dev side of things like others in dev circles generally I've been getting more and more suspicious of their outright asset flips. However their finances can't possibly match up because there are only going to be so many retards buying these games on steam and giving it positive reviews.
Compare that to the indie titles that actually put effort into their games whether you necessarily like what they're doing or not and the differences are pretty stark because I'm seeing titles I've never heard of now regularly hitting the top seller lists which is fascinating. The only other 'big studio' titles that are getting at the top these days are often free to play games which is a bit of a joke because those games don't even technically get sold. Valve is just recording how many people are installing those games on their libraries.
Baldur's Gate 3 and Battlebit remastered are specific examples I'm looking at in the rankings as part of my marketing research as well of course little titles getting up there now. Hell what's even more fascinating is even games like Terraria are regularly on the top rankings these days and that's a pretty old game by today's standards.
Gaming as a whole is a more meritocratic field. I wouldn't worry too much about leading gamers around. They already know what is shit. The uninitiated will make a lot of expensive mistakes along the way and may struggle to learn their lessons, but the indie scene is growing stronger because it's not weighed down by this diversity bullshit.
Yes and no, I think that the indie scene is our hope, but a lot of indie devs are leftists because they're clearly gunning for the positive media coverage and ESG money themselves. It's going to be down to small teams and individual indie devs that buck the trend who will make fun games again.
They've driven away their legacy customer base. What they have left is consumers.