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.
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.