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.
To further the conspiracy theory, I have to wonder whether or not the buyout of successful gaming brands in the past was part of this. They use the brands to generate hype for a game to give the impression they're a real 'games company' and hiring third parties to make fantastic looking cinematic trailers that have nothing to do with the game.
Hype generates, they make money off pre-orders and can justify their ESG money and to fulfil the woke checklist they consistently release crap every year making even irrelevant genres woke as fuck by plastering that stupid rainbow cosmetic crap over everything and generally putting out propaganda. You even see this with games like Halo which are long dead now and they're still pushing 'the message'. Yes, I believe the take over and buyouts were an ESG plan long before any of us were aware that the WEF existed and EA was a part of that plan and a way to corporatise gaming. I'm going to have to specifically advertise my stuff as being non-AI generated among other things and other people will have to as well to distinguish ourselves.
Your example of a company being deliberately run into the ground is really interesting and yes this is the type of thing I'm thinking of but particularly with media. It's the same case with Hollywood and the move to AI and streaming services. Streaming services mean no cinemas or physical locations to maintain that are costing them money. They've realised that the content all these woke actors and writers are producing is easily replicated through AI so they're seeking to get rid of those staff for the sake of cost cutting.
Now we enter the next phase with Hollywood and Games where we'll have AI generated crap instead of anything done by a human and it will just endlessly go through a check list of black lesbians and trannies for the sake of getting those sweet sweet ESG subsidies and that goes for Hollywood especially because they've had to pay out the nose for these actors and writers for so long.
Yes, I've been thinking about this a lot, but honestly? It's going to be hilarious watching it all go down and I cannot wait to make money off these morons. This is going to be a fantastic era for indie devs and artists because not even the normies are going to want any of this.