This has to be the worst researched article I have read from you.
1) You call those who disagree with you reactionaries, which shows your obvious political bent.
2) You are not a gamer. If you were, you would be aware that there is a huge disconnect between the legacy gaming press, which you constantly reference and gamers. The gaming press, tends to be far left. Gamers are not. In you want to hear the other side listen to YouTubers such as Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Geeks and Gamers, etc. You do not have agree with those views, but you have to be aware of them. In the word of John Stuart Mill, He who knows only side on side of the case know little of that" Quite frankly I am disappointed that you chose to hear only one side. You are better than that
3) There are people who play games and there are gamers. You are correct that both men and women pay games, but gamers are overwhelmingly males in their teens, 20's and 30's. When game studios overlook this, they lose money. Take for example Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League. That one game, widely derided as woke, lost Warner Brothers $200 million, Star Wars Outlaws, in which the prime character looks like a 40+ year old woman, will likely suffer a similar fate.
4) You are correct, making money should be the prime objective of any company. But before you can make money, you have to get money. Larry Fink, CEO of Blackstone, which manages nearly 10 trillion dollars in assets, is the father of ESG, He stated in 2017, "You have to force change. You do that by requiring companies to have ESG programs in place to get VC or PE funding. So, Game studios have to keep their PE/VC partners happy, as well as their fans. That is extraordinarily difficult. The result has been that many smaller gaming studios have gone out of business and some of the larger ones are hurting. Meanwhile Asian studios, unencumbered by ESG, are booming.
There has been a widely held assumption in the entertainment and other industries that you will add new costumers if you go woke and still keep your old ones. That has proven not be true. The old ones leave in droves. Lucas Studios, the prime example of this, has yet to make back their purchase price of the studio from George Lucas. You can make a lot of money selling high fat ice cream to your demographic and be far left (Ben and Jerry's) It doesn't work nearly as well when you are selling Bud Light, tractor supplies or woke games.
5) Instead of calling the other side reactionary, you should actually listen to them. You do this in your other areas of research. Who knows? You might actually learn something.
But it looks like I forgot the quotes. And then there's a path dependency, where I ended up using consistent language thereafter, but you're correct, it's not the best way to describe critics of these maneuvers. So I've adjusted the language throughout.
With respect to the gap between legacy media and gaming publics -- here, I think I did try to draw attention to that explicitly at the outset. As I note, gamers seem to skew a little to the right of the general U.S. public, and far to the right of most game designers and cultural commentators.
Likewise, I did note that, for instance, men are much more likely to play games intensely than women, and so on. But, as I continue, from the perspective of gaming companies, the main takeaway they seem to be drawing from stats like this is that the "traditional" (white, Asian, male) market is likely approaching saturation -- they're super engaged at this point; studios can't get much more engagement or money out of them than they already are. So, they are gambling on trying to expand the market to other constituencies (more upscale/ educated folks, blacks and Hispanics, women) -- even at the risk if alienating some "traditional" constituents a bit. This gamble often fails -- it's a gamble! But they've also been seeing radically growing revenue, despite occasional flops. So that seems to be their calculation, I argued. And here, I'm confident based on my reviews of their outputs, that I *am* accurately describing their calculation, whether it's misguided or not.
And here, I'm confident based on my reviews of their outputs, that I *am* accurately describing their calculation, whether it's misguided or not.
We agree that that is their calculation. The question is whether it is misguided. We also agree that gaming revenue has increased. However, who is spending that extra money? Is it the 'new audience " or is it gamers? I would argue that it is gamers. The move from single player campaigns to live service, MMO and MMORPG games has resulted in a change from many games from a one-time purchase to a subscription model. In addition, in game "micro-transactions" have greatly increased revenue.
THAT IS YOUR MAJOR DEMOGRAPHIC!!!
Therefore, if you want to enlarge your demographic you have to do it without irritating your core demographic. Until recently, game companies have done a pretty good job at this. As you point out, many games allow you to pick your sex and ethnicity. Some allow you to "romance" the NPC (male or female) of your choice. No one minds this. No one has ever minded this.
However, we are seeing the same trend in games as we are seeing in movies. White (and in some cases black) men are being demeaned in favor of gays and women. Even more curiously, women are being uglified. "The message" is changing in some games from optional to in your face. Not all games are doing this but the ones that do are losing money. They are losing money because their core demographic is not buying them. That core demographic includes blacks and Hispanics and I suspect that it also includes quite a few "highly educated men and women" Data show that more Blacks and Hispanics identify as gamers than whites. Blacks and women are among the You Tubers I mentioned, and they are neither woke or in favor of the woke movement in gaming
The "gamble" has failed with Star Wars and Marvel. It has failed with AnBev, Target and Tractor Supply. And it is failing with games. Listen to the other side and you will understand why.
47% of those who play games have a college degree or higher. However, the percentage of those who describe themselves as gamers is lower for those with a college degree. See the appendix in the Pew Research reference. I believe that the reasons for are sociological and independent of woke content in games
If you actually look at the numbers, what you are saying ("white men (and in some cases black) are being demeaned in favor of gays and" women" as well as "women are uglified") is entirely based on your opinion and perception.
Don't get me wrong, those things happen; however, the numbers do not back up a systemic impact (unless you focus your analysis on only a certain type of game, be it AAA studio games for example, but then be honest about that).
Finally, about the uglification of women in video games ... we could say the same about men, but please look at your fellow human beings as well as yourself in the mirror: we are all beautiful, yet, only very few of us meet the high standards of what is shown to us. Instead of uglification we should talk about re-calibration as well as stopping the mental abuse we are all subjected to by the discrepancy between our real lives and what is shown to us constantly.
Finally, the whole point of this substack is symbolic capitalism. I'd be damn if the author praises making money as a worthy goal and/or what we have to be doing going forward to heal our societies. I for once don't care about maintaining systems of oppression stemming from white supremacy in this country, even if that comes at the cost of money. We are all spending money on video games (me first, don't misunderstand me here) as a way of escapism (aka entertainment, we may lie to ourselves about that and that's okay, the point stands) so we all owe it to ourselves to realize that if we keep putting making money at the top of our value systems we are doomed to feeling miserable as most of us do and all of us in the end.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and thorough information on video games :-) a gamer at heart, I appreciate the attention to detail here. A long time ago I decided to not play online games anymore, download my games once only, do not use physical support anymore, and enjoy my only consol ever bought in the US (a 10-year-old bought-used PS4). We don't have to stop playing, just accepting the reality if our world (physically limited).
Now, you understand that humor exaggerate points to make them funny. Furthermore, the only reason why video game creators face gaming industry executive non-sense requests is because of our system solely focused on making money, you get that, right? The executives are all gambling on what will make money, they don't care about anything but money, they don't have any other agenda than money, their sole purpose is to make the company/stakeholders money.
If what I said above is wrong, explain why those company never lead social change but always try to capitalize from it? People lead social changes, company follow because they smell the potential money (new customers in a saturated market). We didn't start seeing a major shift to more adds with people of color in them before the Black Lives Matter movement, it happened after that.
Thus, this is not a new problem and attributing it to the social movements (like this comedy sketch is implying) is like standing firmly in the past while the times are changing ... good luck with that (you're only going to be bitter and feel unfounded resentment since all what people want is be treated with respect, they don't want your stuff, they just want to live).
TLDR: the problem is not wokeness, it has always been and will always be our obsession with this imaginary thing we call money.
I get that making money should be the prime objective of any corporation. the problem is that going woke does not work. Go woke, go broke is more than just a meme. Look at Bud Light. Some young progressive ad executive decided that it would be a great ides to make a transgender person the face of Bud Light. The result: Bud Light lost over a billion dollars in sales, had to throw away unsold beer, watched stock price fail to recover, and gone from the No. 1 beer in the U.S to No. 3.
But the real poster child for Go Woke Go Broke is Disney. Lucas Films has yet to make back its purchase price for Star Wars despite releasing show after show aimed at a progressive audience. Park attendance is down, and the Indiana Jones, Dial of Dysentery set a record for most money lost on a movie. Disney stock is less than half of what it was in the Bob Chapek years.
Target, Tractor Supply and even Microsoft are cutting way back on DEI. Larry Fink at Blackstone is backing way off for his "force change comment" as his fabled ESG funds have dreadfully underperformed the market. So, it is pretty clear that it is YOUR stuff that people do not want.
Now you may think that going woke is a great idea. You are welcome to your opinion. But most people play games, watch TV and go to movies for escapism, not to have progressive politics shoved down their throats. You need to keep in mind that not everyone shares your political views and those that do not vote with their wallets.
You claim to have numbers: Let's see them. Be aware that I know how to read a 10K.
I mean ... correlation is not causation my man ... You don't know if what you said (go woke) caused go broke. Notwithstanding the fact that going from making a shit ton of money to making less than a shit ton of money is not going broke ... they're still making money. Finally, you don't know if their move to woke didn't save them a bunch compare to not making the move (they could have lost more money because something else could be causing the lack of interest in Disney for example, oh I don't know, a recession/the inflation/covid?!).
Now, all that is not to say that some company have made moves to woke and that cost them, but once again that'd be just us linking events together while ignoring the many numerous other potential factors at play.
Also, not sure why you think I'm ignoring those that don't share my political views (that you don't know by the way) when I answered your comment because you ignored half of the population who's okay with "woke" as you'd say.
You just proved my point. Instead of appealing to the 50% who share my views or the 50% who share yours, why not double your profit by eliminating the political bull and design games that appeal to both sides.
A 10K is a detailed financial report that all publicly traded companies are required to provide to investors on quarterly basis.
That's interesting, so what makes you think video games (can/should) appeal to every gamer? Isn't that the point of genres anyway? Given that, what's wrong with some games appealing to some demographic?
Also, that has been the case with video games mostly appealing to white man for so long. To me, it seems that now that some games don't anymore, some of us can't take it ... Just play the games you like and accept that you won't like all games anymore (gamer entitlement anyone?!).
Also, that has been the case with video games mostly appealing to white man for so long.
Wrong Again. More blacks and Hispanics call themselves gamers, as a percentage of their population, than whites. And blacks more commonly find positive attributes in video games than other ethnic groups.
You keep missing the point. When you insert politics, right or left into any form of entertainment, you piss people off. When there is no politics, everyone is happy. Look at Deadpool and Wolverine or Top Gun Maverick. Compare the revenues from these movies to "The Marvels". The same thing is happening in video games. Star War Outlaws is shaping up to be a major flop and Ubisoft actually had to apologize to the Japanese people for the latest iteration of Assassin's Creed. It is hilarious to watch!!
This has to be the worst researched article I have read from you.
1) You call those who disagree with you reactionaries, which shows your obvious political bent.
2) You are not a gamer. If you were, you would be aware that there is a huge disconnect between the legacy gaming press, which you constantly reference and gamers. The gaming press, tends to be far left. Gamers are not. In you want to hear the other side listen to YouTubers such as Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Geeks and Gamers, etc. You do not have agree with those views, but you have to be aware of them. In the word of John Stuart Mill, He who knows only side on side of the case know little of that" Quite frankly I am disappointed that you chose to hear only one side. You are better than that
3) There are people who play games and there are gamers. You are correct that both men and women pay games, but gamers are overwhelmingly males in their teens, 20's and 30's. When game studios overlook this, they lose money. Take for example Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League. That one game, widely derided as woke, lost Warner Brothers $200 million, Star Wars Outlaws, in which the prime character looks like a 40+ year old woman, will likely suffer a similar fate.
4) You are correct, making money should be the prime objective of any company. But before you can make money, you have to get money. Larry Fink, CEO of Blackstone, which manages nearly 10 trillion dollars in assets, is the father of ESG, He stated in 2017, "You have to force change. You do that by requiring companies to have ESG programs in place to get VC or PE funding. So, Game studios have to keep their PE/VC partners happy, as well as their fans. That is extraordinarily difficult. The result has been that many smaller gaming studios have gone out of business and some of the larger ones are hurting. Meanwhile Asian studios, unencumbered by ESG, are booming.
There has been a widely held assumption in the entertainment and other industries that you will add new costumers if you go woke and still keep your old ones. That has proven not be true. The old ones leave in droves. Lucas Studios, the prime example of this, has yet to make back their purchase price of the studio from George Lucas. You can make a lot of money selling high fat ice cream to your demographic and be far left (Ben and Jerry's) It doesn't work nearly as well when you are selling Bud Light, tractor supplies or woke games.
5) Instead of calling the other side reactionary, you should actually listen to them. You do this in your other areas of research. Who knows? You might actually learn something.
Thanks for the read and the feedback.
I think you're right on the verbiage. I had meant to put the initial use of the term "reactionaries" in scare quotes to nod to that's how they were *described* -- and I also tried to include links challenging this conception of #Gamergate, such as this one: https://medium.com/arc-digital/almost-everything-you-know-about-gamergate-is-wrong-c4a50a3515fb
But it looks like I forgot the quotes. And then there's a path dependency, where I ended up using consistent language thereafter, but you're correct, it's not the best way to describe critics of these maneuvers. So I've adjusted the language throughout.
With respect to the gap between legacy media and gaming publics -- here, I think I did try to draw attention to that explicitly at the outset. As I note, gamers seem to skew a little to the right of the general U.S. public, and far to the right of most game designers and cultural commentators.
Likewise, I did note that, for instance, men are much more likely to play games intensely than women, and so on. But, as I continue, from the perspective of gaming companies, the main takeaway they seem to be drawing from stats like this is that the "traditional" (white, Asian, male) market is likely approaching saturation -- they're super engaged at this point; studios can't get much more engagement or money out of them than they already are. So, they are gambling on trying to expand the market to other constituencies (more upscale/ educated folks, blacks and Hispanics, women) -- even at the risk if alienating some "traditional" constituents a bit. This gamble often fails -- it's a gamble! But they've also been seeing radically growing revenue, despite occasional flops. So that seems to be their calculation, I argued. And here, I'm confident based on my reviews of their outputs, that I *am* accurately describing their calculation, whether it's misguided or not.
And here, I'm confident based on my reviews of their outputs, that I *am* accurately describing their calculation, whether it's misguided or not.
We agree that that is their calculation. The question is whether it is misguided. We also agree that gaming revenue has increased. However, who is spending that extra money? Is it the 'new audience " or is it gamers? I would argue that it is gamers. The move from single player campaigns to live service, MMO and MMORPG games has resulted in a change from many games from a one-time purchase to a subscription model. In addition, in game "micro-transactions" have greatly increased revenue.
THAT IS YOUR MAJOR DEMOGRAPHIC!!!
Therefore, if you want to enlarge your demographic you have to do it without irritating your core demographic. Until recently, game companies have done a pretty good job at this. As you point out, many games allow you to pick your sex and ethnicity. Some allow you to "romance" the NPC (male or female) of your choice. No one minds this. No one has ever minded this.
However, we are seeing the same trend in games as we are seeing in movies. White (and in some cases black) men are being demeaned in favor of gays and women. Even more curiously, women are being uglified. "The message" is changing in some games from optional to in your face. Not all games are doing this but the ones that do are losing money. They are losing money because their core demographic is not buying them. That core demographic includes blacks and Hispanics and I suspect that it also includes quite a few "highly educated men and women" Data show that more Blacks and Hispanics identify as gamers than whites. Blacks and women are among the You Tubers I mentioned, and they are neither woke or in favor of the woke movement in gaming
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/12/15/who-plays-video-games-and-identifies-as-a-gamer/#:~:text=While%20there%20are%20no%20differences%20by%20race%20or,with%2011%25%20of%20blacks%20and%207%25%20of%20whites.
The "gamble" has failed with Star Wars and Marvel. It has failed with AnBev, Target and Tractor Supply. And it is failing with games. Listen to the other side and you will understand why.
47% of those who play games have a college degree or higher. However, the percentage of those who describe themselves as gamers is lower for those with a college degree. See the appendix in the Pew Research reference. I believe that the reasons for are sociological and independent of woke content in games
If you actually look at the numbers, what you are saying ("white men (and in some cases black) are being demeaned in favor of gays and" women" as well as "women are uglified") is entirely based on your opinion and perception.
Don't get me wrong, those things happen; however, the numbers do not back up a systemic impact (unless you focus your analysis on only a certain type of game, be it AAA studio games for example, but then be honest about that).
Finally, about the uglification of women in video games ... we could say the same about men, but please look at your fellow human beings as well as yourself in the mirror: we are all beautiful, yet, only very few of us meet the high standards of what is shown to us. Instead of uglification we should talk about re-calibration as well as stopping the mental abuse we are all subjected to by the discrepancy between our real lives and what is shown to us constantly.
Finally, the whole point of this substack is symbolic capitalism. I'd be damn if the author praises making money as a worthy goal and/or what we have to be doing going forward to heal our societies. I for once don't care about maintaining systems of oppression stemming from white supremacy in this country, even if that comes at the cost of money. We are all spending money on video games (me first, don't misunderstand me here) as a way of escapism (aka entertainment, we may lie to ourselves about that and that's okay, the point stands) so we all owe it to ourselves to realize that if we keep putting making money at the top of our value systems we are doomed to feeling miserable as most of us do and all of us in the end.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and thorough information on video games :-) a gamer at heart, I appreciate the attention to detail here. A long time ago I decided to not play online games anymore, download my games once only, do not use physical support anymore, and enjoy my only consol ever bought in the US (a 10-year-old bought-used PS4). We don't have to stop playing, just accepting the reality if our world (physically limited).
From the Babylon Bee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xmXVUaafxs&t=49s
This video was funny 🤣 thanks for sharing.
Now, you understand that humor exaggerate points to make them funny. Furthermore, the only reason why video game creators face gaming industry executive non-sense requests is because of our system solely focused on making money, you get that, right? The executives are all gambling on what will make money, they don't care about anything but money, they don't have any other agenda than money, their sole purpose is to make the company/stakeholders money.
If what I said above is wrong, explain why those company never lead social change but always try to capitalize from it? People lead social changes, company follow because they smell the potential money (new customers in a saturated market). We didn't start seeing a major shift to more adds with people of color in them before the Black Lives Matter movement, it happened after that.
Thus, this is not a new problem and attributing it to the social movements (like this comedy sketch is implying) is like standing firmly in the past while the times are changing ... good luck with that (you're only going to be bitter and feel unfounded resentment since all what people want is be treated with respect, they don't want your stuff, they just want to live).
TLDR: the problem is not wokeness, it has always been and will always be our obsession with this imaginary thing we call money.
I get that making money should be the prime objective of any corporation. the problem is that going woke does not work. Go woke, go broke is more than just a meme. Look at Bud Light. Some young progressive ad executive decided that it would be a great ides to make a transgender person the face of Bud Light. The result: Bud Light lost over a billion dollars in sales, had to throw away unsold beer, watched stock price fail to recover, and gone from the No. 1 beer in the U.S to No. 3.
But the real poster child for Go Woke Go Broke is Disney. Lucas Films has yet to make back its purchase price for Star Wars despite releasing show after show aimed at a progressive audience. Park attendance is down, and the Indiana Jones, Dial of Dysentery set a record for most money lost on a movie. Disney stock is less than half of what it was in the Bob Chapek years.
Target, Tractor Supply and even Microsoft are cutting way back on DEI. Larry Fink at Blackstone is backing way off for his "force change comment" as his fabled ESG funds have dreadfully underperformed the market. So, it is pretty clear that it is YOUR stuff that people do not want.
Now you may think that going woke is a great idea. You are welcome to your opinion. But most people play games, watch TV and go to movies for escapism, not to have progressive politics shoved down their throats. You need to keep in mind that not everyone shares your political views and those that do not vote with their wallets.
You claim to have numbers: Let's see them. Be aware that I know how to read a 10K.
Republicans buy sneakers too: Michael Jordan
I mean ... correlation is not causation my man ... You don't know if what you said (go woke) caused go broke. Notwithstanding the fact that going from making a shit ton of money to making less than a shit ton of money is not going broke ... they're still making money. Finally, you don't know if their move to woke didn't save them a bunch compare to not making the move (they could have lost more money because something else could be causing the lack of interest in Disney for example, oh I don't know, a recession/the inflation/covid?!).
Now, all that is not to say that some company have made moves to woke and that cost them, but once again that'd be just us linking events together while ignoring the many numerous other potential factors at play.
Also, not sure why you think I'm ignoring those that don't share my political views (that you don't know by the way) when I answered your comment because you ignored half of the population who's okay with "woke" as you'd say.
PS: what does it mean that you can read a 10K?
You just proved my point. Instead of appealing to the 50% who share my views or the 50% who share yours, why not double your profit by eliminating the political bull and design games that appeal to both sides.
A 10K is a detailed financial report that all publicly traded companies are required to provide to investors on quarterly basis.
That's interesting, so what makes you think video games (can/should) appeal to every gamer? Isn't that the point of genres anyway? Given that, what's wrong with some games appealing to some demographic?
Also, that has been the case with video games mostly appealing to white man for so long. To me, it seems that now that some games don't anymore, some of us can't take it ... Just play the games you like and accept that you won't like all games anymore (gamer entitlement anyone?!).
Also, that has been the case with video games mostly appealing to white man for so long.
Wrong Again. More blacks and Hispanics call themselves gamers, as a percentage of their population, than whites. And blacks more commonly find positive attributes in video games than other ethnic groups.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/17/views-on-gaming-differ-by-race-ethnicity/
You keep missing the point. When you insert politics, right or left into any form of entertainment, you piss people off. When there is no politics, everyone is happy. Look at Deadpool and Wolverine or Top Gun Maverick. Compare the revenues from these movies to "The Marvels". The same thing is happening in video games. Star War Outlaws is shaping up to be a major flop and Ubisoft actually had to apologize to the Japanese people for the latest iteration of Assassin's Creed. It is hilarious to watch!!
Go woke go broke