A survey by the GDC claims that 25% of American game developers identify as LGBTQ. For devs age 18-24, this figure jumps to 43%.
Read that again. Almost half of young American game developers are LGBTQ.
33% of American game devs identify as female or non-binary. This number is up from 25% in 2022. That’s an 8% shift in just two years.
https://www.thegamer.com/women-lgbtq-now-make-up-32-percent-of-all-game-developers-gdc/
From the article:
35 percent of all respondents were white, male, and not part of the LGBTQ+ community. It shows that while strides have been made to diversify the industry, there is still a little way to go
“Perfect diversity” will only be achieved when straight white men are gone.
Western game dev is just super feminine, super gay, and blatantly anti-white. That’s it. That’s the whole issue. It’s a traditionally male industry being overrun by lefty gays, trannies, and feminists while their customers are still very white, very straight, very male, and at least as conservative as the general population. You really don’t have to look any further than that to explain the ongoing conflict between devs and players in western gaming.
This ideological and cultural disconnect is the inevitable result of an engineered demographic shift in game dev. The people who are now in charge of making video games actively despise the demographics comprising most of the people who actually play video games. It’s completely untenable and unsustainable.
It’s too bad they weren’t stupid enough to collect overt political data. With what we know about correlations between ideology and identity, what percentage of game devs must be literal communists?
When I was preparing for my Computer Science degree, I had a passing idea of going into game development, as I think any young nerd did at some time or another. I loved playing games, why wouldn't I like making them?
The advice I got from those more experienced than me was not to touch the games industry with a ten foot pole. The games industry was a machine for squeezing the enthusiasm out of young, naive idiots and tossing them aside when they had outlived their usefulness. They said that you can make a lot more money with a lot less effort programming for businesses. Based on the stories of crunch I have heard from inside the industry, I believe I made the right decision.
This was around 2015-2017, but I think the advice had been the same long before then. That might be part of the reason why the games industry is less white, straight, and male than it used to be. Besides the hostile culture, the big studios simply aren't willing to offer quality devs the kind of salary and benefits they can get elsewhere.
A good friend of mine reverse engineered the Warcraft RTS map files (and other data files) and wrote some widely used (for the Internet of that era) editor software. This was back in the 90s/early 00s.
Blizzard was impressed with him and flew him out to Irvine to interview. He had just finished graduate school (not computer science), and he was in his mid-20s. He was already like 5 years older than the average programmer at Blizzard, and his impression at the time was that Blizzard had such a strong reputation they would bring in hotshots, work them to the bone, chew 'em up and spit 'em out. He had no interest in that.
Smart man.
Because you wanted to continue to love them. There's no quicker way to grow to hate something you used to love than doing it professionally [for someone else].
Gaming has always had a history of corruption, abuse, and criminality if you look into it; going all the way back to mafia owned pin ball machines in Atlantic City.
People are better off building their own games than working for the major developers.
It’s true that leftist activists will take less pay in exchange for an opportunity to promote their ideology. I think diversity hires are putting even more pressure on competent (mostly white, mostly male) devs to deliver functional products for even less pay.