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.
You don't need ESG to explain any of this. Unless you're a massive company ESG money isn't coming your way anyway. The ESG mandates are relevant for where massive index/retirement/government funds invest, and those funds aren't investing in anything beyond the 1000 largest companies anyway.
You have to ask yourself why this is happening everywhere, indies and up.
And it's because of three things:
ideological capture. Your workers are converts, and they will make a huge deal out of things until you relent. Or they will just do what you ask them to do, but bend it to woke. You tell a team to make a shooter, and they make the protagonist a black woman, what are you going to do, tell them to change that? You have any idea how much shit that would get you? And it's enough that a few of them are believers, and the rest will go along, for a similar reason.
people think the worst thing that can happen is bad reviews. No, the worst thing is being ignored. You feed the cathedral what you know the cathedral wants, otherwise it will ignore you and that means you can't sell. Or that's the fear, more often than not it's unwarranted, but people give in for goodboy points and to not disincentivize mentions.
requirements for major awards. Your workers want awards. Awards mean lots of sales. To get the awards, you need to qualify and the qualifications require representation.
The rest is just cost saving and good old corner cutting.