We're a small team of three who recently released our first game after five years of development and a $0 budget. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and I'm super proud of that, but there's a stressful hurdle that's causing us lots of pain.
Our game features a character encyclopaedia of NPCs, and among the numerous details listed, like height and dislikes, are pronouns. This single decision has had a purely negative effect on our game.
- We were placed on "Woke Alert" curator lists before release, attracting negative attention.
- A long Steam Discussion thread attacking pronouns devolved into transphobic rants and was linked from 4chan as a justification for pirating our game.
- A guide was posted on how to hex edit our game to remove pronouns], with offensive replacements.
Our game is called "woke" in Youtube comments and Groomercord channels.
Negative reviews protest the inclusion of pronouns despite enjoying the game otherwise (Example 1, Example 2 ). The oldest remains a month later, despite being reported to Steam. These reviews have dropped our rating from what would have been 96% to 94%, below the 95% threshold for "overwhelmingly positive" when we hit 500 reviews.
The encyclopedia is purely optional fluff; practically speaking, we'd actually benefit if it (and its tens of thousands of words) were never written, which is a shame because we loved making it.
All this for simply including pronouns in an in-game encyclopedia.
It's not just us. Fellow indie Arco recently faced a Steam user threatened buying, refunding, and negatively refunding the game over perceived "wokeness". Multiple comments assure the devs that Steam would quickly remove such reviews. Is this the general perception of how Steam handles this kind of thing? Based on our experience, I don't have a lot of confidence in that. That's what pushed me to make this thread and start a dialogue about it.
AAA games can outpace this kind of attention; indie devs can't. In an algorithmic world where every bit of feedback has a huge impact, the fact that protest reviews mask the actual reception of our game is extremely frustrating and disheartening, and it feels like Steam doesn't have our back.
Discussion points:
What should Steam be doing about activist reviews?
How can small indie teams protect themselves from this, without self-censoring?
We're lucky our game found some success, but any small game risks being buried by an angry mob before it gets any momentum of its own. The current climate forces indie devs to choose between inclusivity and financial success. Would we, or other devs, make the same decision today? I'm not sure. And this doesn't even touch on the broader issue of games getting tagged in "Woke Alert" lists just for having female protags or diverse casts.
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I get very happy feelings when wokescolds realize to their abject horror, that the Pandora's Box they've opened the last decade cuts both ways like a particularly vicious broadsword
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ikr you didn't see these people bitching when futa-hating cute twinks flagged everything as hateful against non-newtonian neurodivergents smh
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Futa isn't intersex its a woman with a massive peepee
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The perfect woman.
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Not necessarily, and she also has a vagina. If she just has a peepee she's a shemale or newhalf.
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Are you seriously expecting a
to know what 'intersex' actually means?
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Literally 0 trans lives matter
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!coomers !commenters
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Funtanari is hermaphrodites which isn't a real thing.
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I can't believe the right is playing by the new rules we changed, those are OUR rules
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You can't have it metaphorically be a box and a sword at the same time.
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Isn't that just futa?
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Rambo's knife has a storage area in the handle
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That sentence is a work of art.
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he just did
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He non-metaphorically just did.
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lmao the original just doesn't hit as hard these days since basically all smartphones are waterproof now
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If anything this proves that the "woke scolds" didn't go far enough. Chuds can't review bomb from the gulags
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Instead this r-slur's take aways are:
Oh now we don't like "activist" reviews huh? Weird.
Whining and hoping that someone will ban everyone that disagrees with you I guess.
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shit neighbor idunno how can i avoid pissing
s off without self censoring
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These people deserve everything they have coming to them, and i guarantee it's not money.
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The year is 2027. All triple A games are vetted by Ugly Manatee LLC. Protagonists are all wh•te m•ids and every major studio has an entire floor of programmers working on jiggle physics.
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Indeed.
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Is it still possible to buy games, give them negative reviews, and then get a refund? I want to give these dweebs a 7th negative review
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Sometimes they will still let you refund it after but the policy for steam is within 14 days and less than 2 hours played they will refund your purchase.
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If the detail is so small, why include it? Its only hurting you. Go on, take it out. I dare you. Or... Are you afraid someone else much worse is on the other side of the fence...
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For real, I don't understand how you can make people think that they're forced to accept your ideals and comply with it. One nice thing about capitalism is you cannot force people to buy things. Even if someone can't voice why they dislike something, they don't have to buy it. Which this r-slur doesn't understand.
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jewish lives matter
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Yeah, the problem here is that leftoids want to be able to cancel rightoid products, but want platforms to protect them from politically-motivated reviews. Sometimes this can be done through anti-hate policies, but most places (reddit exempted) aren't so brainrotted that they consider mere disapprovals of woke shit as hateful. So they demand an even heavier thumb on the scales, which... isn't going to happen.
Live by the mob, die by the mob.
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No they don't. They want to be able to cancel chud products. They view any rightoid as a good and well meaning person who just got fooled by the white nationalists.
They do now, the pendulum is swinging. You've noticed it yourself right? All the 2020 type 'anti-hate platforms' have gone quiet and are just getting filled with the old 'hate'.
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Self-censoring isn't a thing chud
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Don't like it? Build your own game distribution platform. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
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And it's not even the big platform doing the heckin consequences, it's the unwashed masses, the users.
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The customer, who isn't always right.
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I love when these people act like the current discourse around pronouns/ neopronouns and forcibly inserting them in everything is totally normal and has been happening forever.
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They always use "reactionary" as a slur but never say what people are reacting to
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Yeah! How are reactionaries inherently bad, when by definition they're not the ones starting shit? They're not "actionaries."
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Because according to Foucault, what we think of as traumatising experiences aren't inherently bad and it's only people's pathologising reactions to it that causes the negative effects. This is true of all things, but especially of kiddy diddling - Foucault was very keen on emphasising that last part.
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Least predatory Frenchman
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If I'm parsing it correctly, what he's saying I actually agree with him. Yes, diddling is awful,but only Angloid countries treat it like the betrayal of Judas by Jesus was done to you;like I don't know how to describe it, they treat it like they're permanently ruined ,and the kids act accordingly, meanwhile mental/emtional or physical abuse? Tough it out kid. Like no one would support some complete stranger shooting a dude or woman because he was mean to his kids, but we've made diddling this ultra-thing you can never recover from, when really we just need to be like that's tough, suck it up champ, the same way we do mental/emotional abuse or rarely physical abuse.
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You are not parsing it correctly. He doesn't actually care about that, he just wants to diddle kids.
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'Your disagreement and downmarsey is a mental breakdown, while my ranting and swearing about the exact same thing is just rational discourse, fricking sweaty!'
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My favorite is the old "a riot is the language of the unheard", which strangely never seems to apply to protests they dislike.
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Rioting is fine when its a peaceful protest
Rioting is not fine when its a violent attack
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Loving the two pronged use of frick here, very impactful
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They literally cannot lack this much self awareness, can they?
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Why should the Right Side of History be forced to play by the same rules as the bad guys, chud?
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The shamelessness of
knows no bounds
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Suddenly they don't like "activist reviewers" when its on them, lol.
Which you didn't have to. You have to go out of your way to include a pronouns subtext when normal people are able to discern the pronouns of characters when they read about them.
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It cuts both ways
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Remember donglegate? Until people are losing their livelihoods for joking about whitey, the scores haven't been settled.
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Donglegate proved that foids were simply too soft to work in computer science.
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Which is already one of the softest fields !bluecollar
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'So You've Been Publicly Shamed' by Jon Ronson covered, and talked to, a lot of people with different experiences of being mobbed online. It was notable that, out of all of them, Adria Richards the Donglegate lady was the only one still self-righteous and aggressive about the pushback she received. She had learned nothing from the experience, even as she had experienced both sides; she was exactly like this dev, convinced it should all only go one way.
Everyone else could reflect on what had happened, but she lacked any self-awareness. It stood out.
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Average woman
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They should be hard instead
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The frick is dongle gate??
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At a tech conference roundabout 2013-2014, someone giving a presentation made some comment about computer dongles, I don't remember
Some guy jokes to his friend "yeah I've got a big dongle"
Some foid in a separate row complained to twitter and the dongle joker lost his job and his livelihood within 48 hours
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Rest in peace, dongle king
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The strange thing is that this happened then, a good 2-3 years before the eggshell-walking brainrot fully set in, and that it only happened once, when I'm sure there was ample opportunity since.
But I guess maybe I have my dates wrong and 2014 was peak feminist agendapushing, before the
s took over everything.
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Yeah 2014-2016 was peak girlboss Buzzfeed/Jezebel era of feminism with the manspreading and mansplaining craze from what I remember. It largely fell out of favor by 2017 to intersectional feminism and train discourse.
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If someone asked me in 2015 what, if anything, would get rid of the then-current feminist nonsense,
s and bl*cks would not have been my answer... But it really goes to show how fragile and socially motivated these periodic outrages are: you don't even have to bother to push back against it, just give them something else to focus their superfluous energy on and go back to doing what you're doing.
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That initial round of discourse was also very online focused with the seeds being laid by the Atheism+ movement of ~2012/2013 and being cemented by GG in 2014. It was a very loud movement online but it didn't really have much of an offline presence until MeToo.
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I know, its why now they don't suddenly like it when its on them.
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If they wrote "Gender" instead of "pronouns" they probably would have avoided the backlash while being possibly even more woke.
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especially when there's a text about the character right next too it. "Bob likes beer, he also likes mowing the lawn." There, now the pronoun has been established. No need for HR fæggotry.
jewish lives matter a lot too HR fæggots
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Oh come on, they already were doing this in the original Civilization 30 years ago. Remember?
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You have a differing interpretation of this art?
Guess what, you're LITERALLY illiterate you stupid motherlover 
. You enjoyed art wrong you fricking r-slur
BAD ACTOR ALERT
WEE
WOO 
WEE 
WOO 
"Bad Actor" is an important keyword for leftoids because it allows you to say that something is bad without saying why it's actually bad. For example, this is an example of rightoids doing a "cancel culture" but they don't want to say that "cancel culture" is bad because thats like what leftoids are known for these days, and they want to reserve the ability to use that trap card for later (cancel culture isn't real chuddy).
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Hitler once said "freedom" so freedom is a dogwhistle now, chud.
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How young are these people that they think calling people special little snowflakes was invented by the writers of Fight Club?
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Snowflake came from fight club? Source
on that? I always thought it was cause all snowflakes are unique and special, just like these people pretend to be.
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"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
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Not gonna watch that you know Im right 💅
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!nonchuds Look at the chuddies celebrating as if its some win when in reality its advert/ragebait by the devs which gets their game talked about and bought
The game is currently at 93% positive reviews by the way so it's obvious the post is bait
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By the ledditors, yes
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"These reviews have dropped our rating from what would have been 96% to 94%, below the 95% threshold for "overwhelmingly positive" when we hit 500 reviews."
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So you're arguing 3 negative reviews are "devastating"? It's very obvious that the title is bait
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I think it matters. "Overwhelmingly positive" is the point where you can trust that it actually is good.
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G*mers have awful taste. Never buy a game that's more than 60% positive
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Fr, all publicity is good publicity this is definitely just a marketing angle
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