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?
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!