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 really is, these technologies should be streamlining game budgets, not bloating them. The budgets for cutscenes have gone up with mocap almost becoming industry standard and occasional celebrity voice actors, but not anywhere near enough to justify this.
And the product of those mocap and voice over expenditures? Cringe cutscenes that most gamers aggressively skip.
What pisses me off about that shit is like with the infamous Fable trailer it's not even particularly 'good' mocap and it shows. Which lends more credibility to the idea that it's all about meeting woke checklists for the sake of getting ESG money instead of releasing anything good.
We are never going to get even decent sequels of anything again by these people and I squarely place the blame at ESG targets for games companies. As a result, I only ever look forward to something that's an original IP and has been made by an indie dev because they will simply have way more incentive to make a real game and not some shitty open world third person walking simulator.
Let's say a game takes 5 years to make. Now, most are closer to 2-3, but we're being generous. That means a $150mil budget game (for reference, Fallout 4 had approx 300Mil budget, but that includes advertising) has has $30M/anum.
HR is always the biggest cost in big business. Let's assume you pay everyone the same amount, commie company, from mocap to vis effect artist to boob physics playtester, $100,000/year (after ER-side taxes, health plans, etc). MOST occupations would be more than happy with a six figure salary, even in gamedev programming (quick google search, average wage is 91k for them).
You have a budget for 300 employees at this exorbitantly generous rate for your 5 year game cycle. But really, closer to 200, because you need a building, computers, program licenses, etc. 200 EEs: 10 writers (storyboard), 10 concept artists, 10 FX artists, 20 actors (mo-cap and/or voice), 10 foley artists, 40 actual programmers,
a director/manager/liason/supervisor for about every 10 of these so 10 total, 5 janitors, 5 security, 5 accountants (payroll/taxes/purchasing/sales/budget), 25 beta testers, 10 marketing/B2B people, ~5 lawyers on retainer for legal, ~15 international translaters, 15 generic internal communications or middle management types to coordinate all of this, and 5 leeches at the very top earning the real piles of money for "owning" the company.