Phil Spencer blames capitalism for being bad at his job
(www.pcgamer.com)
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That's a good question.
In the same way that there are protests and pushback against wokeness in record droves, there are also a lot of people who have become complacent with it. For instance, if I bring up Baldur's Gate 3 being woke in any general news/gaming/media channel, the average person will have a conniption and defend the game to the death that it's "not woke" and just a "great game". I was recently watching one video where they were comparing character creators and someone said that Baldur's Gate 3 had one of the best character creators they've played. It left me scratching my head because it's not even in the top 10, and has a ton of severe limitations compared to even older games like Black Desert Online, which, to my knowledge, is still probably the best out there.
All that is to say, while a lot of people are now awake to the DEI/ESG nonsense, and while you're right that opposition to wokeness is at an all-time high (especially with anything coming out of the house of the mouse, or policies from Labour/Democratic politicians) there's also still an unfortunate amount of people still wholly complacent to it all. The normies.
I think if Spencer could land one or two big AAA successes for Xbox that are just decent enough (they don't even have to be good, just decent), and still kept pushing woke nonsense in subsidiary support titles, then yeah, they will succeed in pushing wokeness.
Even now, look at Sony -- almost all their major titles are woke. But Helldivers 2 has made people forget about it for the most part, and Stellar Blade has people convinced that wokeness on PlayStation is mostly dead. It's just two games. Are they enough to convince people to buy the next woke Naughty Dog outing? I guess time will tell.
Jim Ryan was the PlayStation head when the wokeness at that brand was at a peak.
Hiroki Tatoki has taken his place. He's from Japan, so he may very well have a firmer focus on making quality games that entertain everyone- which is exactly what Japanese gamers have been wanting (Japan as a whole does not seem happy with the globalists' push to force them to accept wokeness one bit.)
Quite the contrast from his predecessor, who must have signed most of the decision making over to the California division.
From what you've said about those two games, he may have come in at just the right time.
I'm not holding my breath or anything, but he seems like he's actually trying to get publishers and developers to knock it off with the wokeness.
The disgusting, ignorant way the PlayStation social media team and the U.S. division responded to the aftermath of the 2020 Summer of Love made me wary about buying a PS5.
However, games like Tekken 8 and Elden Ring do look rather tempting, and I heard the wokest personnel like Neil Cuckmann could very well be leaving the industry altogether- or at least have far less influence.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but it looks like things might finally be heading in the right direction for the PlayStation brand again.
On the other hand, do you think Phil Spencer is close to scoring that successful game? FH5 was sort of there, but its numbers could very well have just been boosted by Game Pass' existence. And Halo Infinite and FM 2023 seem to have disappointed players so far and are cited as examples of what's wrong with the current Xbox brand.
That's an extremely cogent point about Tatoki taking over. I haven't been following the minutiae of the industry anywhere near as closely as I used to (thanks to the wokeness in media escalating to absurd degrees I've kind of retreated to other hobbies over the year). But what you say could track with a newfound direction for PlayStation with Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade leading the way, and Tekken 8 seemingly being part of the wave of games actually aimed at the core demographic of gamers.
The real tell will be what proper first-party titles look like coming down the pipeline, and whether they will buffer the support of the three aforementioned titles with other non-woke games, or if they will use those games to try to win back gamers and then bombard them with wokeness, similar to what Netflix does with the first season of a show being somewhat decent and then the subsequent seasons being full-on propaganda.
Hard to say. CDPR went woke but managed to recover thanks to the Cyberpunk anime, and now people have mostly forgiven them, so they now have leeway to fail or succeed again with whatever they make next. Microsoft went woke and has had nothing to recover them since all their supporting media is also still woke, like that Halo TV show. So it's not like they can leverage their current line-up of games based on cross-media success, because they have none. Had the Halo TV show been cool and successful, it might have rekindled interest in Halo Infinite, and then that would have been their success story, much like Edgerunners rekindling interest in Cyberpunk 2077.
Unless they have something special waiting in the wings or in development at one of the countless studios they've usurped, then no, I don't think they're close. Spencer isn't a dumb guy, though; he has to see the writing on the wall. No one wants to play Fugly Fable, or that voodoo-themed SBI game. But if I had to guess, Spencer will keep politicking his way through each quarter while more woke titles release.
If push comes to shove he might scout for an indie game still in development and purchase exclusivity rights for it to try to score some good goy points. Something cheap and fun, like Palworld, or that game where you play as a modern soldier in medieval times. Those kinds of AA-titles might be the fallback plan if things keep imploding for the Xbox brand.