wokies are afraid games might go back to appealing to men

I think they're just trying to expand into untapped markets. Like they know g*mers are mostly straight men so they think if they make big pushes to try and appeal to other groups they will keep that core audience while also bringing in new players

The problem is that it just doesn't work like that and for every gay black woman gained as a customer they lose 10 straight men as customers

Just wholesale rejection of core audience.

The "big bet" of woke media was that it should all be sanitized and feminized to appeal to a "broader audience" of women and URMs. That a lot of the things that appealed to straight men in particular (eg. fanservice, grittiness, a lack of openly leftoid political messaging) were net negatives for having the desired broad appeal.

If you replaced your jacked white male shooter lead with a middle-aged ugly black woman lead then you'll appeal to all non-white male audiences more and if white males liked your game less then well.. it's kinda problematic to care about that, no? You're not going to say this is a bad thing and publicly and lose your job when a mob comes after you, right? Of course you aren't.

The only thing that's ending the madness is that this strategy is driving firms to actual financial failure and when people can openly and plausibly argue "if we make this game woke we will literally go bankrupt" then they are able to achieve some traction in their pushback.

I remember throwing money at strippers in Duke Nuke 3D.

I also remember Duke Nukem 2D and Commander Keen.

!oldstrags !GenX !g*mers

I dont get video games devs and companies. Just wholesale rejection of core audience. Just why?

large bureaucratic organizations are actually literally r-slurred. seriously get a bunch of smart people, pay them lots of money, and stick them in a hierarchy... and their collective intellectual capacity drops by like 1-2 std deviations.

capitalism's saving grace is the fact we can more easily switch them out once they expire, not that they are more intelligent on a per organizational basis.

usually the better, longer lasting ones manage to keep the og people/teams around. but as ea is the epitome of shareholder driven capitalism were everyone under the board is basically just a fungible asset on a balance sheet... they haven't done that, and so they really do devolve down to lowest common denominator decision making.

!codecels

Companies wanted the wage slaved and activists they hired for dirt cheap to feel like they were making some meaningful high art as they assembled slop.

Just why?

DEI is patient zero, hired activists, not people who want to make games. Games are not only horrible sermons about woke shit they actively suck too. Gorrillions of dollars are lost over years, people keep doubling down making the pendulum swing worse every year it goes on. Now those fricking r-slurs are getting the widest pendulum swing in history heading right for their face and all they can do anymore is mald and cry about it.

Just why?

Where did people come from to say. Games are not from them. Its for everyone else.

The basics of any modern company is the search for growth. The assumption is simple, sweaty nerds are a captive market whose growth potential has tapped out so now you, a business executive, seek to grow your market by onboarding new demographics into the game world. Everything proceeds from such and it isn't some bug or conspiracy it's very much the expected way things are supposed to work.

EA hit this idea big with the Sims after all. The foid game of all time which had a non-zero amount of sweaty nerd moid g*mers too. Churns out an enormous amount of DLC too. To an extent, a lot of EA's failures can be put into the basket of attempted and failed "Simsification". And while each failure as a company is well known the successes can bankroll the company* and most importantly the most recent quarterly earnings report on the whole.

*The big money maker for EA though is FIFA, now known as EA FC, Ultimate Team itself is a partial Simsification of the FIFA series itself and it's where a good chunk of earnings come from.

The smelly nerds transitioned and realized how lame in a Not Cool way they and moids as a collective were and are so they tried to fix it. Sadly the smelly nerd moids are still the majority so it didn't work (yet). !g*mers

Just wholesale rejection of core audience. Just why?

"the core audience are bad people on the wrong side of history and they give me the ick. i hate them and wish they'd die."

If you want a case study, look a Kamala's team telling her not to go on JRE. These people aren't using the viewpoint "would this help her win the election/would this sell us more games". It's about vibes and signalling and ostracisation. [Thing] is rightoid-coded, so you should signal against it, else you take a social hit.

When these conversations are happening, the immediate ostracisation of being on the Wrong Side Of History in a group discussion is much stronger than the diffuse possibility a game sells fewer copies years down the line.