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.
What the e hell does speed tree have to do with ESG?
They use paid assets to churn out their shitty woke projects much faster than they otherwise would have managed and meet ESG targets which is why everything has to have a black lesbian female and a tranny these days.
Speed tree has been around longer than esg. And it’s a tool for making procedurally different trees not just one off trees like you would find in an asset pack. Because why bog down your environment art team with making trees from scratch and having to sculpt 50+ tree variations in zbrush over a time of months when you can move some sliders and node connections around and get plenty of realistic game usable trees in a fraction of the time. It’s a really weird thing to include in your collection of factors for esg in games. It’s like claiming that they use photogrammetry tools for scanning tiling textures is esg related because they use a technology to get realistic brick materials for buildings. Even without these tools they would still get things made cheaper than doing it in house with outsourcing companies in SE Asia, India, and Eastern Europe. These are literally just reducing the cost slightly on their outsourcing budget.
If their goal is to release a stream of shit product to keep getting esg money it would be cheaper to do a free to play live service game and constantly virtue signal some new esg goal with every update to receive more esg money. No need to spend money constantly on new games when making new content for one game is cheaper.
You are conflating cost saving techniques with ESG which are totally unrelated things. Some studios do use these tools poorly but they are not used by an esg mandate. If you want to look for signs of esg money in games look for their company announcements about their board/dev teams now consisting of x percentage of women and x percentage of gay, or x percentage of some other leftist pet group. Look for their posts about their green initiatives or donations to/partnering with organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with games.
Of course I'm conflating cost saving techniques because that's part of the scam. I've seen how tech companies in general operate this way because it's all pretty well laid out as nothing is technically illegal even though it's shady as fuck.
CEOs create small tech businesses hyping them up whatever their selling as the next big thing to go up against the evil Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook when their whole goal as it turns out is to get bought out by those exact companies or some other bigger competitor. They walk away with the cash while their unwitting employees get the boot and this happens more often than you think. What's fascinating about the types of people who do these start up companies as well is sometimes they're even young and they're often people already with ties to these businesses and they're using these startup companies to make their money.
Seems you missed where I pointed out that SpeedTree and paid assets generally are not a problem by themselves, it's just more often than not many projects by big studios now especially in the games industry are shameless and poorly disguised asset flips in reality if you look at their back end for longer than 5 seconds. Yes, paid assets aren't the exclusively 'bad thing' that coincides with ESG, it's just how many of these companies facilitate what frankly I would be almost willing to call an outright scam these days because of how little work is put into these projects and these are the tools they use to do it.
It's undeniable unless you're dishonest that paid assets factor in hugely into the total collapse of any kind of production standards. There's cost saving techniques and then there's laziness. In short, these games are not worth the $60 they're charging and definitely not worth $70 they want to charge.
No you are ranting about esg and complaining devs use a tool that has been around for 2 decades to make production of mundane background objects like trees more quickly freeing up time for their artist to work on other assets that they would not have had time or the budget for without it. You might as well link esg to carpenters who have the nerve to purchase boxes of nails instead of forging them themselves.
Why not add Wwise sound engine use too because ” those lazy devs” aren’t spending time authoring their own unique sound engine when it’s more efficient to license wwise.
Or any other middleware tool that has been used for decades because of the quality end result and low price to license vs creating it from scratch.
You are connecting dots to stuff that are totally unrelated to esg and name dropping development tools as if they’re use because it saves the developers time and money is somehow a sign of esg to involvement. And claiming that because they saved money on one thing that it’s a scam for them to charge the same price or slightly more than the historical price for a game…. Because the trees that’s only job is to fit into the environment and not look weird was made with a tool specifically designed to make the pain in the ass task of modeling a kit of trees easier was used.