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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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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Oh come on, they already were doing this in the original Civilization 30 years ago. Remember?
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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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