Boss Fight: DEI or Die Trying
Western Game Developers Went Woke And Broke (And How to Repair the Damage)
If you haven’t picked up a game controller since Gamergate, you’re probably wondering how the world of video games has fared since the Great Vibe Shift finally heralded the end of the Peak Woke Era. Well, I work in video games, so I can provide you an insider’s perspective; and I regret to inform you that, while the rest of the world continues to remove the pronouns from its bios and memory hole its onetime fervor for overt anti-White and anti-male discrimination; Western video games have remained a cultural wasteland of woke slop and DEI garbage, with no sign of abatement.
It’s hollowing out the industry like the undead in Dark Souls.
Looking back, Gamergate was a warning shot: a flash-in-the-pan glimpse of who was coming for your vidya, and what they/them intended to do to the industry. For a while, there, it seemed as if the forceful immune response from the 4chan gigabrains—followed by the rise of Big Orange a few years later—had successfully staved off the invaders.
But unfortunately, the invaders persisted, thoroughly infecting and eventually rotting the video game industry from the inside out. The end result?
Far worse than you could’ve possibly imagined.
The Sorry State of the Video Games Industry (or: How to Ignore Your Players for Unfun and Unprofit)
If you’re not deep in the voxel trenches, it’s easy to look at the following chart and conclude that video games are doing better than ever:
The industry has grown a lot in recent years! Player spending is up across the board, and last year saw the release of over 20,000 games on PC alone, in just about every genre imaginable—and more than a few unimaginable genres, for that matter!
And, yet, the industry is laying people off at a record clip. Nearly 45,000 gaming jobs have straight up vanished into the ether over the past three years, and although last year saw layoffs ease a bit (there were “only” 9,175 layoffs in 2025, down from 2024’s 15,631 jobs lost), it’s still a bloodbath, and once-unstoppable AAA juggernauts like EA and Ubisoft are now resorting to taking truckloads of Chinese, Saudi, and PE money up the ass just to stay afloat.
When asked why the industry is in so much trouble, “expert analysts” will cite things like ballooning budgets and live-service failures. Okay, fine—those are all real and partially to blame. However, those are surface symptoms. The industry at large still refuses to recognize the root cause of its woes, even though players can see it clear as day:
AAA developers, especially Western ones, refuse to listen to their core audience.
Who’s this core audience, you ask? Well, just look in the mirror: the young, male, edgy gamers who have always formed the core market for video games despite the industry’s persistent efforts to gaslight us otherwise.
In other words, THE CHUDS.
And what do the chuds want? It’s quite simple, actually:
Fun games
Big guns
Hot chicks
Epic and tough-as-fuck boss battles
Space to shout as many insults and slurs as we want at each other in between matches1
and, oh, yeah, let’s not forget—
FUN GAMES
But what do game developers keep giving us?
Preachy and annoying narratives
Forced diversity checkboxes
Androgynous and/or ugly character design
Gameplay sacrificed for virtue signaling
a.k.a—
WOKE BULLSHIT
The chuds obviously want no part in any of that nonsense, so they vote with their crypto wallets and don’t buy these games. Meanwhile, the so-called “mOdErN AuDiEnCe” that this wokeslop presumably appeals to never seems to materialize. Predictably, sales tank, the game flops, the studio closes, and the developers finally go back home to McDonald’s.
The studios that remain never seem to get the fucking hint, because after every flop, fast forward a few months and you somehow see YET ANOTHER woke shitturd release to abysmal sales, Steam review bombs, and boycotts, leading to yet more layoffs and studio closures, repeating the cycle.
As long as game devs refuse to take their heads out of their rectums and listen to what the marketplace is shouting into their ears, then the industry will never recover from the state it finds itself in.
The “Structural Factors” Cope
Making a video game ain’t cheap, and it’s only gotten not-cheaper over the years. Development costs for a AAA title often exceed $200 million, plus another $100 million or so for marketing, plus even more for a live-service game that runs on a never-ending content treadmill. If such a game flops, that’s not a blow that most publishers can absorb. And if several such games flop? That can tank even the biggest operations in gaming.
Industry analysts will often blame publishers chasing live-service games. This is mostly cope. As proof, consider that many Asian studios have recently pumped out several highly successful live-service titles, directly refuting that hypothesis.
Oh, yeah!—short aside—speaking of Asia: most of what I said about the sorry state of gaming really only applies to the Western industry. The Eastern games industry is popping off right now. They keep pumping out hit after hit, going on hiring sprees, and making deeper inroads into Western markets year after year.
Alright, so what is the difference between Western and Eastern studios?
Well, these same analysts will point out that hiring Asian developers costs way less than Western developers, once again, positing a structural diagnosis.
Are you getting tired of the cope, anon?
I will concede that, yes, this lower cost confers a massive buff to Eastern developers. But like any explanation described as “structural,” you should take it with a huge spoonful of salt and dig a few layers deeper.
Turns out: Eastern studios aren’t beholden to DEI/ESG mandates that actively impede the creation of games that center player-tested and player-approved entertainment.
The studios hardest hit by layoffs recently—almost all of which are Western studios—are the ones that, because of the aforementioned ESG mandates from investors like Vanguard and BlackRock; which acquired massive stakes in Western studios at firesale prices; and most shamelessly chased the “mOdErN AuDiEnCe” with preachy horseslop instead of iterating on what players actually wanted: tight gameplay, attractive character designs, and escapist stories free of activist agendas.
This DEI push, facilitated by subversive “cultural consultancies” like Sweet Baby Inc., compelled AAA teams to ignore the critical feedback loops that indies and Asian studios rely on, leading to multiple billion-dollar misfires. As a result, the Western gaming industry is in its death throes despite record global spending, because Western output increasingly fails to resonate with its players.
At this point, you may be wondering why nobody at these studios puts the brakes on the circlejerk. Surely, somebody within the +10k-person-strong team typical at a AAA studio must have realized this crap wasn’t going to sell. Why didn’t they just suggest listening to what the players were clearly trying to tell them?
Unfortunately, those people simply don’t exist inside Western AAA studios anymore. Yes, you read that correctly: the people whose job it is to listen to market pressures and adjust company strategy mostly don’t work for the company. The few that do have very good reasons to keep their mouths shut.
Ever since the blue-haired brigade embedded itself in the games industry during the 2010s, a culture of toxic positivity has metastasized and subsumed the AAA space. Honest feedback, leet alone genuine criticism, is discouraged and actively punished. The true believers in the cult of spiritual equality instinctively write off all player criticism as bigoted.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a dive.
The Vidya Woke Slop Hall-of-Shame
I could sit here all day long and tell you how bad things really are, and continue showing you a bajillion more graphs and figures that drive my point him. Unfortunately, this would only appeal to the pasty-skinned math nerds who have trouble holding controllers.
Instead, let me drive the point home by showing you examples of what developers in the past decade thought “players would flock to.”
Without further ado: