Lies, Damn lies, and Talentless Freaks
The “western” video game market lead by a clueless bunch of diverse femme-presenting people is currently in a death spiral, but it has vapid skin deep representation and AI-enhanced super scaling too!
This is my semi-regularly published Subscribers Only piece for my cherished paying subscribers. This time we’ll be discussing the entertainment industry as a whole, with a focus on video games and at the end, Disney - of course. Buckle up, it’s about to get crazy.
Subtext: They hate you and they want you out of the picture. That is, if you’re a cisgendered heterosexual man and you aren’t firmly on the neoliberal spectrum. If you’re a Kamala-voting genderqueer physically disabled blue/green-haired person, welcome - pull up a chair, stay a while! Just know your place and consume product.
The “Male Gamer gaze”
(Via Sony - of course they couldn’t just give you the $30 stand, or a Pro controller, or a disk drive - not at these prices!)
In September 2024, the western “video game market” state of health is shockingly poor, aside from a very few bright spots. With Microsoft axing endless jobs following underperforming studio offerings, and Sony introducing a $700+ USD “Pro” mid-cycle refresh PS5 gaming console - gaining paltry improvements for the money - met to critical panning, the two biggest publisher-cum-hardware makers are in dire straits.
That’s just one facet of a larger picture, though. Sony for example isn’t just facing cultural rebuke for a marginal improvement in hardware for a price point outside of current PC trends, Sony as a publisher recently stumbled hard and failed to sell their title “Concord”, a 5-v-5 “hero shooter”, always-online “live service” in the vein of Overwatch (ad nauseum others), for $40.
The game was instantly panned as “not worth the money”, with a specific focus on its visually unappealing characters that had no popular IP behind them, and prominently placed neo-pronouns on characters biographies, including for sexless-agender-robots. Yes, you read that right. Even the fucking trashcan-looking robot needed to be festooned with a pronoun tag.
(Via YouTube)
The game was sold on both PlayStation and on PC through Steam, but not that you’d know it given how little pre-launch marketing was done; at best estimations it sold a shockingly few 25,000 copies across both platforms worldwide* (*where PSN is available). The matchmaking servers were unceremoniously shut down after just a Scaramucci, about 10 days, and PlayStation Network after 12 days force-refunded all console owners while remotely deleting the content from their devices, with nary a consenting from the end user (perhaps someone out there really did like it and wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons, who knows).
In early access purgatory for months and in development since roughly 2016 at a cost of (estimated) $200,000,000, the game has been the biggest flop on any medium in modern times and possibly eclipses other catastrophic developer failures in the gaming industry history as a whole. The studio, Firewalk Studios, for its part, tried to stay loyal to their customers before Sony ultimately cut its losses, and pulled the plug.
The team proudly supported their work online and battled “hate and abuse”. In the wake of the recall, the studio has been silent and its artists/developers have been removing the work credit from their Twitter biographies.
At launch, a deep-rooted visually unnerving nature of the character set was panned by denizens on the internet, giving birth to one of the greatest self-owns in human history, though characters alone were not the game’s only problem. Some users reported long wait times for matchmaking, others commented on lackluster gameplay with a dated feel. Some questioned if additional content would even help at all.
Others still would comment to the developers in general, trying to show the team a shred of goodwill in such a trying time.
“A huge labor” to alienate one’s audience in an instant, and become a viral meme at the same time. Some online would protest this shutdown, claiming the “CHUDs can’t have a win” and “lonely losers were just mad they couldn’t jerk off to the characters”. None of this would help, unfortunately. The game would still be memory-holed.
Firewalk Studios at time of writing has yet to comment on any of this with their employees distancing themselves publicly, preferring instead to keep its company mouth shut while packing their collective desks. The studio, based out of Washington state, will not likely be making a game any time soon, if ever again.