The Video Game Awards for 2023 (like every year) was a big nothingburger. Trailers highlighting how bad gaming has gotten worse not only with woke shit, but also the lack of gameplay in the majority of Western developed games and their trailers. It’s fucking awful.
Geoff Keighley desperately wants to become a Hollywood big shot and it’s really pathetic… But the thing is he is merely a reflection of the game industry at large and the talentless hacks who have taken over and want to make movies instead of games. Games media and Game Devs are complaining about the lack of focus on devs, and I just don’t give two shits about the plight of game devs.
They created this monster by being embarrassed of their own profession and transforming the industry into a complete and utter joke. They were all spineless cowards who allowed the woke plague to come in and ruin the industry at best, and at worst were completely complicit in the industry-wide brain drain and woke transformation of video games.
When I hear about studio layoffs, I just shrug because nothing of value was lost. When I hear about entire studios shutting down (in the West), I feel nothing, if not perhaps a satisfaction that these studios self-destructed.
I don’t care about these game devs, because I know they hate my guts and don’t actually care about video games.
The same mindset applies to the vast majority of indie games that are either made by dipshits who couldn’t make it in Hollywood and just see gaming as an alternative outlet to make movies, or woke leftists who don’t have a single creative bone in their body. The fun indie games are buried in a sea of lifeless/woke copycats and walking simulators.
This clown world has made me completely unsympathetic to the plight of most workers overall. Good job elites, your diversity and inclusion plan of division worked. I really don’t care about any of these people.
I generally don't anymore. Because it's always the same story: "Evil Executive X made us implement Terrible Feature Y and that's why the game has issues!" But, the fact remains that the devs implemented it. That predatory monetization scheme? The devs coded it. Those awful facial textures? The devs included them. That awful gameplay loop? The devs implemented (or, in some cases, "didn't implement" may be more accurate) it.
If you recognize that the thing you're being asked to do will make a terrible product, then either get your project manager to grow a set of balls and tell the suits no, or (if the manager agrees with the suits) grow the balls yourself and tell him no.
"Oh, but I might get fired!" Yes, and? Playing along didn't save the jobs of the people at Luminous after the turd that was Forspoken or the people of Volition after the Woke Row reboot, or the people at Hairbrained Schemes after the rushed, unknown Lamplighter's League. And while the studios survived (for now), playing along didn't help all the people recently let go at Bioware and Creative Assembly. And those are just the ones I remember from 2023!
And on top of that, video games are an industry where it's relatively easy to have moderate (or, in some cases great) success if you do a good job and are able to budget things properly. Even ignoring the occasional massive indie breakout, there's huge numbers of moderate success stories from smaller, competent devs. Just on the RPG front (because those are the games I like the best) Larian is an obvious one as they were around for 2.5 decades before BG3 was a huge critical success for them. Obsidian and inXile both crawled out of the wreckage of Interplay. Stygian (Underrail) and Owlcat (Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous and now Rogue Trader) are two more indie RPG studios. And there's certainly more, those are just the ones that come to mind. Whether you like or dislike any of those games or any of those studios, the fact remains that those are all (or were, since Obsidian and inXile both got acquired by MS over the last few years) commercially successful studios for years without having large publishers over them.
Are you guaranteed to make it on your own? No. But if you actually want to make good games and it really is the publisher holding you back then grow some stones and either stand up to the publisher to make the AAA game good or go make your own thing.