No this has nothing to do with James Rolfe, lol.
When you look at a woke game <insert whatever relevant example springs to mind here>, it seems nonsensical that they would target an audience that, frankly, has no interest in games in the first place, while alienating the core demographic of gamers who will practically break down the door to buy the game on launch if they think it's worth it.
But there's an old internet adage that covers why they do this;
Please don't feed the trolls
think about it, they wind us up ruining a perfectly good franchise, and inevitably some gamer or group of gamers go off on the game, crap-flooding the dev/publisher's social media with abuse. (I know, not every gamer is like that, but let's just be real, every group has its members that the rest would like to distance themselves from, and gamers are no exception.)
the dev/publishing team then play the victim, and inevitably this gets the "modern audience" of woke sycophants, who wouldn't otherwise be caught dead in a gamestop or KB Toys, to buy the game, just to own those evil, racist, mysogynistic, yada yada gamers, making angry gamers free advertisers to the target demographic.
The only problem with this strategy is it doesn't seem to be working anymore, at least not to the degree it might have ten or fifteen years ago. maybe people are wising up? I dunno, or maybe the economy is so bad the virtue signalling crowd can't actually afford to own the gamers anymore.
I guess what I'm saying is if instead of getting angry, we all reacted with indifference and moved on, the devs would have nothing to sell their games on, because core gamers wouldn't buy it, and there's no shitshow to sell it to woketards.
i realize it's not a perfect strategy, but it is something to chew on.
This is the winning play here. The long game. Market capture via attrition.
You're absolutely right that it's sadly working; if you mention something is "woke" within a complete normie circle, there are enough younglings within that demographic who will recoil at any negative connotation associated with "woke".
They're ignorant, uneducated, and have practically no knowledge of anything, but they regurgitate the Leftist talking points because you can tell they have been inundated nonstop with agitprop. Since they aren't very bright, you can easily dismantle any kind of rebuttal they offer, but there's the unfortunate realisation that they are already converged.
This was always the play -- capture the education system, academia, and the top-town corporate culture and force-feed it to the Westerners until they adapt, adopt, or quit. We're seeing generation of zombies adopting their ideology, and this is going to be the real problem going forward. That's why Trump winning isn't quite the win some people think it is, because once those four years are up, every other Western nation is still occupied by Leftist culture capture.