I was just thinking about the sorry state of modern gaming, and that video of the Diablo 4 level designer chicks (trying to) play the game they helped design popped into my head.
This also ties in to a comment I made somewhere recently about being tired of anything "white" or "male" or "straight" or just generally normal being derided, and the destruction of those things being celebrated.
"Dude bros" is generally just code for passionate young white men. Now, sure, there are some negative aspects to young men of any race (usually overshadowed by the never talked about positives), but it was weaponized as a smear by fucking race communists to try to invade and take over...well, everything.
Things were better when "dude bros" ran (or at least contributed) to things. Back in the day, these creative innovators were genius nerd gamers who were hyper-passionate about their work, and it showed. They were rockstars, who actually played and cared about the field they were contributing to, and pushing forward.
Today, we have a bunch of diversity hires (anyone non-white and/or non-male, and/or non/straight) who often clearly have never seriously played a video game in their lives, much less the game they're spending their time designing. They're not passionate about the field, they're not passionate about the project. They're either just there for a paycheck or, worse, they're there to take shots at the imaginary "dude bros" in their minds that haunt their every waking hour. They're out for revenge, and to rub it in the faces of the dude bros that came before, and the dreaded largely straight white male demographic their games are still appealing to. I'm not even sure they have the self-awareness to realize their own work will never even hold a candle to that of the dude bros.
TL;DR: Put nerdy White/Asian male gamers back in charge of game design, and kick out the harpies and queers. Simple as. Same goes for society, probably.
Ninja Edit: The dude bros could make really impressive shit run on a calculator. Modern game design makes supercomputers sweat doing basic fucking shit. Save me from this nonsense.
One More Edit: Excellence used to be rewarded. Now it often gets hitpieces written against it by jealous journos working for the megacorps who churn out the shit games. If you don't pay the tithes, you don't get attention.
Modern 'games developers' are a bunch of pussy bitches who can barely cobble together an average third person controller ( They seem to avoid FPS' now because they're primarily catering to consoles ) and the reason that their games always run like shit despite being extremely simple mechanically is because they vomit 4k textures all over their models and their models themselves are in the hundreds of thousands with barely any optimisation done on them.
At first I was wondering how professional it was appropriate to be when talking about these types of people but honestly given what they're doing to everyone around them and the borderline illegal practices they're doing in the business fuck them. They absolutely deserve to get trolled out of existence and if there's one thing that can unite the games community it's this.
Yes, you're right, things were better with the 'straight white males' and asians in charge, yes you're right, these people have never played a video game in their lives and it shows. The more we uncover about their shady dealings the more it's looking like the initial buyouts of various competition back in the day were part of the long con to make sure that there was nobody around to prevent them from running IPs into the ground so they can collect their ESG and DEI money.
Edit: I'm convinced if you gave these people any sort of real AI coding behaviour to look through or an RTS setup they would probably not be able to do it.
Probably also the influx of artfags as graphics have become more and more important. Used to be that programmers comprised the majority of dev teams, but now they're just a small part. Also you have a lot of people who wanted to join Hollywood but ended up having to go into game dev instead.