Dragon’s Dogma 2, despite catastrophically bad optimization and very negative reviews, has already broken 200k concurrent players on Steam.
Horizon Forbidden West, a purportedly flawless port with very positive reviews, has so far topped out at just over 25k concurrent, roughly half the peak achieved by the first Horizon.
Things can certainly change. Also, Horizon is a two year old game at this point, although still one of the best looking games in existence.
But those numbers are anemic, especially in the wake of Sony’s last PC release (Helldivers 2) hitting almost half a million concurrent players.
Is it possible that the Sweet Baby Inc. story penetrated the mainstream far enough to influence consumer behavior? I’m not aware of any formal connection between HFW and SBI, but it does seem like gamers are becoming more conscious of both the woke taint on AAA and their own ability to avoid it.
Who knows. Maybe it’s just a mirage. A man can dream.
I’m sure there was passion put into Dragon’s Dogma 2, but the amount of black people in the game as NPCs makes it a straight-up no buy from me. I will wait until there is the possibility that someone mods out the black characters, though the anti-mod DRM makes me doubt it will be possible.
Anti-mod DRM in the game is already a deal breaker.
Its Capcom. Probably the wokest of the Japanese devs. What did anyone expect? The first one slipped under the radar, which is how it got to be as enjoyable as it did.
This one is a top shelf IP they are trying to make a mainstream hit. It will be hit with their full force wokeness.
Capcom is the worst of all with their wokeness , but a lot of the big Japanese game companies started randomly shoving black NPCs in their games everywhere all at once, you know its not natural . They are getting paid to do this. Whose paying them to do this?
its obvious devs need to tick off some woke checklist that management gave to them.
I think we can still draw a distinction between "the company is actually woke" and "the International/Western branch/publisher told them to do X" with some Japanese companies. Like, I don't think FromSoft is woke in the slightest, but they still did the Body Type nonsense with Elden Ring likely on command from Bandai.
Capcom is one of the few where you know the rot is actually internal.
that's exactly how i feel as well.
A lot of the time it's probably just Japanese people noticing that American media nowadays is full of blacks regardless of context so they just imitate the trend to appeal to American consumers without thinking about it too hard.
Of course this trend isn't actually indicative of organic consumer demand, but as a Japanese normie you have no idea what's going on and you don't care, so it's easy to make the mistake of seeing a trend and assuming that it's just what all the kids are up to these days.