Interesting perspective and nice comment from Savvy underneath.
The main problem beyond the ideological that comes with these consultants is that you deprive your in-house talent experience in creating their own stories and become heavily reliant on outsiders to make them.
Its a trap and it's better to make your own stories even if you lack the experience than forever be dependent on the assistance of outsiders.
It definitely is a trap. Those DEI consultants don't suffer the consequences at all. They get paid and are onto the next grift by the time the product goes to market and nobody buys it.
That's a problem with consulting in general too. They get paid to insert themselves in your project with little context, implement exactly what you tell them to, then leave once the contract is up without giving you any documentation. During their contract they will constantly delay because they have other clients they are behind on, so what you are delivered is a rushed mess. When it sucks, they don't care because they got paid and you're too cheap to hire in house, so you'll come crawling back anyway. When you go out of business because the thing you counted on them to build was late and not fit for purpose, they move on to the next sucker
Consultants that are "masters of their craft" when such crafts are an integral part of your media (and you can't be expected to have those sorts of experts on your dev team) is reasonable.
There is no reasonable time for DEI/ESG consultants. And a researcher of ancient Japanese gay pedophilia is not a historian.
They can be good for technical authenticity. Things like, "what would a fighter pilot call out here? Who would be on the other end of the radio?" You're probably not going to keep a retired combat pilot on staff just to get that right.
But that doesn't apply to the fake racial "authenticity" DEI consultants want because there is no one correct way to be whatever.
Yeah I'm pretty sure Kojima brought a bunch of experts in for Metal Gear Solid 2 to make sure they were more accurate in terms of technical details like how you would clear rooms, what you say on the radio, etc.
Its modern sense of "agent appointed by a sovereign state to reside in a foreign place to protect the interests of its citizens and commerce there" began with use of the word as appellation of a representative chosen by a community of MERCHANTS living in a foreign country... https://www.etymonline.com/word/consul
always demand they're paid only a percentage of net revenue
Funny thing about that. It's standard in the oil industry. The mineral rights owner gets a 1/8th, the geologist consultant gets 1/32nd, the refiner gets 1/8th, and the operator gets the rest, but has to maintain it.
I was talking to someone who is suppose to be a creative director who insisted he didn't think people could write "authentic" stories without having some lived experience.. it was very strange and I thought, my goodness how can characters ever be created then by this person? I don't know who imposed these restrictions on people or the idea that someone can't write a type of character without some "consultant"....the free market determines success, but i really do believe every single person is capable of telling a story...
We know precisely who imposed this. This dialectic is built into the Social Justice Racket to force over-hiring of dependent upper-middle class theater kids who make a large majority of the newest generation of "entertainers" in the entrainment industry. They are also an ideologically captured client group to Leftists. "You can't write a story unless you personally experienced it", means that the bigotry of low expectations is at it's strongest, allowing the least meritocratic people of all to enter into the creative arts by force. You are being required to hire low IQ individuals and/or individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that do not have the intellectual capacity to pass a fucking Theory Of Mind test.
And since you will have not experienced many things in your life you're going to have to hire dozens of these people. Your artistic work will be turned into a make-work project for a committee of delusional idiot ideologues that don't have the ability to rotate an apple in their own head. This will be considered the only way to run a profitable company in CURRENT_YEAR + 10 by the Marketing, Public Relations, and Human Resources departments. And if you don't like it? You get the ice pick treatment for being a counter-revolutionary that Trotsky got.
This is why you call it out and kick it in the face the moment you see it the first time.
DEI consultants = leftist commissars. They filter your creativity through leftist ideological lenses in order to restrict the range of your output to whatever leftists find socially/culturally/politically acceptable. The appeals to compassion, accessibility, theoretical market growth, etc. are all smokescreens, plausible deniability for the truth: you are being controlled by subversive leftist revolutionaries who have no respect for you, your audience, or your craft.
90% of “artists” are just leftist posers. They loudly crowed about freedom of expression when their own output was being ignored by free markets. Now these assholes champion the soft censorship and pervasive interference of the leftist “consultant”. Because fucking with people’s creativity is a-okay when the result is product correctly aligned with leftist doctrine.
Holy shit, Ori and The Based Forrest for Game Of The Year apparently.
When it comes to the stories we’re telling, I always approach it from a human angle first and foremost and let the story tell me where it needs to go. If it tickles me to have a gay character in our story and I feel like that character could be fascinating then I will push for that. But I would NEVER make a character gay simply because some outside party told me that it’s hip to do so and that we might face backlash if we don’t.
Yeah, this is not the screed of a rightist, but is instead the screed of a genuine artist protecting his art from the Social Justice Racket.
He doesn't know how hard he's going to have to keep fighting on that line until he learns it really is just a political attack, and even softspoken attempts to "tell a new story" are literally the same level of maliciousness as what he's dealing with now.
He's looking at it as a kind of "Consultants are greedy idiots", but their not idiots. They are your intractable enemy, who's sole purpose is to destroy art and turn it explicitly into propaganda. Their greed is partly for embezzlement, but a lot is for redistributing your wealth to other activists and perpetuating the aggression of the Social Justice Racket. It's not greed v. art (which will always be used as follow-up attacks by Leftists who will frame greed as Capitalism, while explicitly profiting off of these attacks). It's Leftism v. humanity. It's evil v. good.
People end up thinking that's a reductive analysis, but it's genuinely not. It's a foundational one.
DEI consultants exists to fabricate problems, their buisness model is finding problems.
Whatever you did, they will find problems. The more woke you pre-emptively garbage-ify your work, they will one-up you another increment. They have to. It's their job.
Yeah I caught Kim Bellair’s self indulgent “TED talk” in her SF echo chamber yesterday. Trying to paint SBI as this plucky, underdog company of 16 loveable writers who just love gaming so much, and the entire time I’m listening to her I’m just remembering how they tried to shake that one studio down for like $8m for their “consultancy” services.
She’s a fuckin charlatan, standing up their deflecting and gaslighting that Sweet Baby Stink has nothing to do with “woke”. Yeah, Valhalla had no lesbians, Saga Anderson wasn’t black, Spider-Man was a bastion of male fortitude and Kratos didn’t spend 16 hours being bullied by a bunch of Norse cat ladies (one of whom was also black). Nah, it’s all in our heads 👍
The stink of desperation is palpable, knowing her little brand is now so toxic that their clients have asked that their names be removed from the SBI website (as if the audience somehow won’t still be able to spot sweet baby slop a mile away).
I think deep down she knows this grift is over and it’s time to move on to the next one. She should just go work for Disney or write for the Atlantic or some other insufferable collapsing pile of shit
It is funny. Leftists try to push their games as art that chuds and normies dont understand.. but allows consultation groups to fuck up their art even more.
The two Ori games are Metroidvanias, and also quite old by this point so they probably run just fine.
Their current big game is No Rest for the Wicked, which is in Early Access and still needs to be there to shed some bad elements from a genuinely good action game.
im under impression thay DEI consultancies started selling a "Bash-a-DEI-consultant-on-twitter" service.
His no rest for the wicked thing is very obvious DEI slop, from the artstyle, to the mandatory "took a shovel to the face" strong female characters, to the the "body type" selection in character creation. but here he is, posturing as a straight-shooting based salt of the earth anti-DEI crusader on twatter lol.
Interesting perspective and nice comment from Savvy underneath.
The main problem beyond the ideological that comes with these consultants is that you deprive your in-house talent experience in creating their own stories and become heavily reliant on outsiders to make them.
Its a trap and it's better to make your own stories even if you lack the experience than forever be dependent on the assistance of outsiders.
It definitely is a trap. Those DEI consultants don't suffer the consequences at all. They get paid and are onto the next grift by the time the product goes to market and nobody buys it.
That's a problem with consulting in general too. They get paid to insert themselves in your project with little context, implement exactly what you tell them to, then leave once the contract is up without giving you any documentation. During their contract they will constantly delay because they have other clients they are behind on, so what you are delivered is a rushed mess. When it sucks, they don't care because they got paid and you're too cheap to hire in house, so you'll come crawling back anyway. When you go out of business because the thing you counted on them to build was late and not fit for purpose, they move on to the next sucker
Never hire consultants.
Consultants that are "masters of their craft" when such crafts are an integral part of your media (and you can't be expected to have those sorts of experts on your dev team) is reasonable.
There is no reasonable time for DEI/ESG consultants. And a researcher of ancient Japanese gay pedophilia is not a historian.
I've yet to work with a consultant that was worth the money, and I was one for the early parts of my career
They can be good for technical authenticity. Things like, "what would a fighter pilot call out here? Who would be on the other end of the radio?" You're probably not going to keep a retired combat pilot on staff just to get that right.
But that doesn't apply to the fake racial "authenticity" DEI consultants want because there is no one correct way to be whatever.
Yeah I'm pretty sure Kojima brought a bunch of experts in for Metal Gear Solid 2 to make sure they were more accurate in terms of technical details like how you would clear rooms, what you say on the radio, etc.
Its modern sense of "agent appointed by a sovereign state to reside in a foreign place to protect the interests of its citizens and commerce there" began with use of the word as appellation of a representative chosen by a community of MERCHANTS living in a foreign country... https://www.etymonline.com/word/consul
If I had a multi-million dollar game studio, I would hire them just to tell the development team to do the opposite on what they suggest.
Funny thing about that. It's standard in the oil industry. The mineral rights owner gets a 1/8th, the geologist consultant gets 1/32nd, the refiner gets 1/8th, and the operator gets the rest, but has to maintain it.
Take a page from Hollywood and make it net profit. Then keep stacking "expenses" so they'll never see a red cent.
We know precisely who imposed this. This dialectic is built into the Social Justice Racket to force over-hiring of dependent upper-middle class theater kids who make a large majority of the newest generation of "entertainers" in the entrainment industry. They are also an ideologically captured client group to Leftists. "You can't write a story unless you personally experienced it", means that the bigotry of low expectations is at it's strongest, allowing the least meritocratic people of all to enter into the creative arts by force. You are being required to hire low IQ individuals and/or individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that do not have the intellectual capacity to pass a fucking Theory Of Mind test.
And since you will have not experienced many things in your life you're going to have to hire dozens of these people. Your artistic work will be turned into a make-work project for a committee of delusional idiot ideologues that don't have the ability to rotate an apple in their own head. This will be considered the only way to run a profitable company in CURRENT_YEAR + 10 by the Marketing, Public Relations, and Human Resources departments. And if you don't like it? You get the ice pick treatment for being a counter-revolutionary that Trotsky got.
This is why you call it out and kick it in the face the moment you see it the first time.
Explains why i've seen so many bald black women in media. It all comes from the same rulebook.
DEI consultants = leftist commissars. They filter your creativity through leftist ideological lenses in order to restrict the range of your output to whatever leftists find socially/culturally/politically acceptable. The appeals to compassion, accessibility, theoretical market growth, etc. are all smokescreens, plausible deniability for the truth: you are being controlled by subversive leftist revolutionaries who have no respect for you, your audience, or your craft.
90% of “artists” are just leftist posers. They loudly crowed about freedom of expression when their own output was being ignored by free markets. Now these assholes champion the soft censorship and pervasive interference of the leftist “consultant”. Because fucking with people’s creativity is a-okay when the result is product correctly aligned with leftist doctrine.
Holy shit, Ori and The Based Forrest for Game Of The Year apparently.
Yeah, this is not the screed of a rightist, but is instead the screed of a genuine artist protecting his art from the Social Justice Racket.
He doesn't know how hard he's going to have to keep fighting on that line until he learns it really is just a political attack, and even softspoken attempts to "tell a new story" are literally the same level of maliciousness as what he's dealing with now.
He's looking at it as a kind of "Consultants are greedy idiots", but their not idiots. They are your intractable enemy, who's sole purpose is to destroy art and turn it explicitly into propaganda. Their greed is partly for embezzlement, but a lot is for redistributing your wealth to other activists and perpetuating the aggression of the Social Justice Racket. It's not greed v. art (which will always be used as follow-up attacks by Leftists who will frame greed as Capitalism, while explicitly profiting off of these attacks). It's Leftism v. humanity. It's evil v. good.
People end up thinking that's a reductive analysis, but it's genuinely not. It's a foundational one.
If he maintains his integrity he will be forced to join the Fight in as much as he will be cast down into the pit like the rest of us were.
Big if. They almost never do.
Yes.
That's what happens when integrity confronts evil.
DEI consultants exists to fabricate problems, their buisness model is finding problems.
Whatever you did, they will find problems. The more woke you pre-emptively garbage-ify your work, they will one-up you another increment. They have to. It's their job.
Tell them to go fuck themselves.
It's rent-seeking as an industry.
I like this guy more every time he opens his mouth.
And it's usually the opposite when it comes to game devs
I'm glad to see more indie devs standing up to defend the integrity of their work.
I find it interesting that their tactics didn't work, so they're just attacking him.
Proving him right about it being for profit, and not to help make something better.
And as someone here pointed out, this thought crossed my mind a lot, too.
If they're so interested in making the game better with their asinine input, perhaps they should profit share instead of taking a lump sum.
Oh no, but those games 99.9% of the time never do well. Gee, I wonder why that is.
Yeah I caught Kim Bellair’s self indulgent “TED talk” in her SF echo chamber yesterday. Trying to paint SBI as this plucky, underdog company of 16 loveable writers who just love gaming so much, and the entire time I’m listening to her I’m just remembering how they tried to shake that one studio down for like $8m for their “consultancy” services.
She’s a fuckin charlatan, standing up their deflecting and gaslighting that Sweet Baby Stink has nothing to do with “woke”. Yeah, Valhalla had no lesbians, Saga Anderson wasn’t black, Spider-Man was a bastion of male fortitude and Kratos didn’t spend 16 hours being bullied by a bunch of Norse cat ladies (one of whom was also black). Nah, it’s all in our heads 👍
The stink of desperation is palpable, knowing her little brand is now so toxic that their clients have asked that their names be removed from the SBI website (as if the audience somehow won’t still be able to spot sweet baby slop a mile away).
I think deep down she knows this grift is over and it’s time to move on to the next one. She should just go work for Disney or write for the Atlantic or some other insufferable collapsing pile of shit
I wonder if it's time for brand new robes and a free pair of sneakers over there.
she should speedrun cult endings with her staff.
It is funny. Leftists try to push their games as art that chuds and normies dont understand.. but allows consultation groups to fuck up their art even more.
Well now I'm tempted to buy a couple of their games. They're platform games, right? How well do they run on Steam Decks?
The two Ori games are Metroidvanias, and also quite old by this point so they probably run just fine.
Their current big game is No Rest for the Wicked, which is in Early Access and still needs to be there to shed some bad elements from a genuinely good action game.
im under impression thay DEI consultancies started selling a "Bash-a-DEI-consultant-on-twitter" service.
His no rest for the wicked thing is very obvious DEI slop, from the artstyle, to the mandatory "took a shovel to the face" strong female characters, to the the "body type" selection in character creation. but here he is, posturing as a straight-shooting based salt of the earth anti-DEI crusader on twatter lol.