December isn't just about Christmas or if you're in the upper hemisphere freezing your balls off because you forgot to wear gloves and a thicker coat, also looking back at the year and taking stock.
Starting from the least woke and more extremely bad management, we have Chinese vtuber agency AuroraliveVR that operated like gangsters (so typical Chinese company) and they've lost 41 English vtubers leaving them only 2 which seem out the door too.
Then there is Project Veritas this year where I'd say less woke more corporate in that they didn't want to go against Pfizer same as Fox with ditching Tucker Carlson because he was digging too close to the truth.
Now to the wokies, the big highlight is Budweiser for just how publicly they failed and actually got the conservatives to act effectively in boycott, Target also deserves a mention. Disney for how they seem to be constantly slipping down the hill into obscurity. WB that owns DC might be close but ironically the Hogwarts Legacy drama seems to have given them a life raft when they needed one. Another mention is Creative Assembly that seems to have summoned their Sega masters to bitch slap them after their waste of money on woke projects.
There's too many to list from OpenAI, Unity, Amazon and the disaster that was Rings of Power, which notable ones do you think did the most self inflicted harm this year?
Disney losing $750m in a single year of new movies.
Boeing
Not only will Starliner not fly in 2023, but now they've also pissed off the DoD enough to get cut from the E-4B replacement program.
Fucking yourself out of a military contract, you know if they weren't fired they're definitely going to put the people responsible in the middle of a lake..
The company that got the E-4B contract instead... was Sierra Nevada.
At this point it's entirely possible that Sierra will also launch their DreamChaser BEFORE Starliner. Both vehicles have launches planned for April 2024. Any further delays by Boeing and they could wind up being last to reach the ISS.
Boeing has stated something along the lines of "we will never accept a fixed cost contract again" because of Starliner. I hope that means they never get another contract.
In the last five years, Boeing has essentially wrecked their company and their reputation. 737 Max, utterly refusing to restart 757 production for Delta (promising the 797/NMA instead), cancelling the NMA, losing the Moon lander to SpaceX (which Elon did on a lark), Starliner failing (but actually not failing, guise!), pissing off the Air Force until they may lose the refueling tanker contract, and now losing the E-4B.
Remember that Airbus won the KC-40 contract the first time. Boeing whined to their pet congress reps, and the AF was basically ordered to re-do the competition, which Boeing "won", and consequently hasn't been able to deliver on despite developing the entire concept of in flight refueling in the first place.
Meanwhile the KC-135 fleet continues to pile on the flight hours, and the KC-10 is being retired without replacement.
Add on to this the utter retarded method they created for the boomer to see the boom on the -46 because they didn't want to modify the airframe. This, from the company that added a fucking bomb bay to the 737 to create the P-8.
One of the funniest convos I've ever had with a tech rep was with a senior manager on the P-8 program. "So, without a MAD boom, what are you guys going to do about AIP boats?" "Our sonobuoys are really good!"
In their defense, nobody runs a MAD boom anymore, not even the P-3s that the P-8 is replacing. S-3s had theirs removed years before they were retired.
McDonnel Douglas put a window into the bottom of the DC-10 when they made the KC-10 (and a seat for the boom operator!,) Boeing has no excuse at all.
any that implemented ESG .. so all of them
Given the cuts we are seeing across the board with them, you seem to right...
Budweiser, obvious reasons
Mimimi Games. Because unlike all the rest of the examples, they straight up died from it.They made extremely niche games in a long dead genre, but were otherwise quite loved for it by those who enjoyed such a thing (isometric stealth strategy games).
But then they hired Sweet Baby the ESG mob company to help them diversify up their newest game, which caused their narrow profit margins to drop into the red and they shutdown literally the moment their newest game came out.
The joke of course being that the game was set in a pirate caribbean setting, one of the few where both blacks and women would raise no eyebrows to begin with. So the rewriters likely just milked them dry for nothing but a "protection tax."
I am one their fans, and just now learned from this comment that they will shut down. I guess it is because I am years behind on games, and have not even played Aiko's Choice yet. Damn shame, as the ones that I have played from them were good.
Did they woke it up for Shadow Gambit? I simply threw it on my wishlist when it released, which might have been a mistake.
I don't think so. There is nothing overtly woke about it other than there being a bunch of women as your crewmates and the Main one (and one other) being black. Nothing that I saw was ever mentioned about this nor any political point made other than "Inquisition fanatical church bad" which is pretty cliche.
But for a lot of people here, there just being a black woman as the main character is enough to scream woke, so there is that. And Sweet Baby listed them as one of their clients, which leads one to believe that the money spent there likely helped contribute to the fall.
Its by far my favorite of their games, as they moved much more into the fantastical and paranormal with this one, so you have far more interesting and unique skillsets to deal with problems. And really my only complaint is that they don't show you the "Challenges" until you complete the game, meaning you can't go for them while doing the story and thereby padding the post game out a lot. You can get them if you figure it out but its still unnecessary padding on an already full 30 hour story mode with at least 30-50 hours more post game anyway.
Sounds like it is still worth playing, thank you for the detailed report!
IDW comics, which was already woke as hell, decided to double down, the leftoid way. They ended up laying off 35% more of their staff, and got delisted from the New York stock exchange. Through all of this they promoted Heather Antos, who has a visible trail of $$ loss behind her. Like, you can see the corpses, and they still double down. Maybe if we just message harder!
Volition, nuff said
I've felt like they've been a zombie company for years, like their last attempt was Agents of Mayhem but the poor gameplay ruined it for them.
Poor gameplay and marketing, they kept riding SR instead of taking inspiration from GI Joe, the whole game was set up like it even with the themed villains and elaborate underground lairs
I'm going to say Disney / Marvel.
It's been a year of flops for both of them. But I can't decide which ones failed harder. Gonna need to check the numbers, but it's probably Disney.
Given that Disney's owned Marvel since 2009, both of those failures fall on The Mouse.
These are just some examples of companies that harmed themselves through their policies in 2023. There are many others that could be mentioned, such as Facebook, ExxonMobil, and Boeing.
As funny as it sounds, Blackrock and Vanguard.
No-one really knew who they were last year.
I'm gonna give an honorable mention to Unity, who managed to get the whole indie scene doubletaking with a per install fee.
That disrupted their customer/developer's business models so badly that some were looking at pulling products from storefronts to avoid fees from the new retroactive fee structure.
Whole swaths of games built with Unity would have become unprofitable retroactively, with fees upwards of 40,000 dollars set to land on some developers.
There's a reason the ex EA greedhead CEO lost his job there, and that was how spectacularly he spiked Unity.