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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Microsoft Vetoed A Black Woman On Cover For Fable II

Areaz32 on 13 May 2016

As a person of color i just don't care at all.
If you are targetting the average gamer (white male) why would you not just do the regular stuff?
Why do video games have to be a testing ground for social politics?
Why can't they just have it inside the game and not in the marketing?
I have played video games all my life and i have never in my life looked at video game packaging with a black guy on it and thought "i want to play this game" by the sole fact that he was black.
They try to treat people as groups instead of treating people as individuals. I don't like this progressive movement.



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BOLLOCKS on 13 May 2016
kurasakiichimaru said:
BOLLOCKS said:
Sony didn't want a white girl on the cover of The Last Of Us.

This SonyToo™ Force again? Aren't you tired? Sony let ND do as they wish. That's the difference.

I know they did, it's in my sign. I'm not an SJW, brah.



COKTOE on 13 May 2016
KLXVER said:
CosmicSex said:

I have to disagree, because it makes it sound like Microsoft doesn't have faith in their developers and instead falls back on sad tired tropes.  A good game will sell itself.  Cultivate your developers and let their talent sale your games.   Also, it makes gamers look like simpleminded and thats insulting.  As a gamer, would you not buy a game because it had a black lady on the cover?  I would like to believe that most gamers will play a good game regardless of who is on the cover.  

This happens all the time unfortunately. Just like Sony not wanting a black James Bond.

In movies? ummmm, I think TOO many characters have been fiddled with in recent years. Especially in the superhero genre. And why always, always black? How about a Thai Hero/Villain? Indian? Ultimately, I think most of it should be left alone. Creating some new characters would be a radical idea, instead of messing around with well established characters by changing their ethnicity for seemingly no other reason than to do it. A Bond of a different ethnicity would be a-ok, as it's kind of accepted that there is no ONE bond anyways.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

COKTOE on 13 May 2016
potato_hamster said:
CosmicSex said:

James bond isn't actually a real person even in the lore.  Its a code name that  assigned to any Agent 007.

So you just wouldn't want a black bond (here on out known as BB lol)...  has nothing to do with the actual story.  

Secondly, it really doesn't matter who plays who as long as they do the role justice.  

"Skyfall" directly contradicts this.

Don't take my word for it:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/11/11/how-skyfall-clears-up-bonds-biggest-continuity-question

Fascinating. I never realized.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

the_dark_lewd on 13 May 2016
Soundwave said:
the_dark_lewd said:
Hardly surprising news.
Black women make up about 0.5% of the Xbox audience. White men make up about 80%.

It's kind of silly to get annoyed about that. Microsoft are paying for it. They won't want to gamble on something like that.

I doubt that demographic, pretty sure Asian/black/latino makes up more than 30% of the gaming market. Could be closer to 40%.

By 2020 less than half of the children in the US are projected to be white, so continuing to make games in this "you can only make a game with a white lead" is quite frankly just stupid.

Well you just added asian and latino, dropped the "female" qualifier and dropped the Xbox qualifier. So sure. But I was very specific in what I said! 



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potato_hamster on 13 May 2016
Ka-pi96 said:
potato_hamster said:

 

Developers have all the agency they want if they're footing the bills. You can't honestly expect publishers to hand developers millions of dollars without any control or oversight over the final product.

Well if Microsoft didn't want to let Lionhead create their own games, ya know the games that made Lionhead popular in the first place, then why buy them? If they wanted to decide everything about the game they could have just made some new studio to do their bidding and avoided all the takeover costs.

Why buy them? The answer is obvious - to make money. There isn't a game out there that's paid for by a publisher where the publisher doesn't have substantial say in how the game turns out. It's the way it is and it's always been that way because at the end of the day, investors want to make sure they get the biggest return possible on their investment.



Fei-Hung on 13 May 2016
pokoko said:
SvennoJ said:

I'm glad someone else actually read the full article.

Kinda funny how this one little marketing issue is blown up to portray MS as the bad guy, while if you read the article, Peter Molyneux was a far more destructive force on his own people. The whole Milo and Kate episode was all Molyneux which he simply couldn't let go. Several times during his career his ambitions got the better of him, which marked the turning points in the studio, adding to its ultimate demise.
The acorn. Or, according to one former Lionhead developer, "that fucking acorn." sums it up nicely.

He's a great visionary that inspired a lot of people and made some great things, yet not suited to lead a big development studio. I hope he can get back to former Bullfrog glory at 22cans, although Godus is not a good start.

I still don't know what to make of Molyneux.  One paragraph, someone is talking about a brilliant idea he had, then the next, they're talking about him lying to the public and how his late additions almost screwed everything up. 

The Milo and Kate stuff, though, even with his excuses, it just sounds like a disaster.  What he supposedly envisioned sounds like something that is still years away from being possible, even with VR.

Also, to be honest, some of those Lionhead guys seem like assholes.  They made a LOT of poor decisions even before the Xbox One mandates started rolling in.

 

It's just my own thoughts on molly but I think he was given more credit than he deserved from the PC simulation game era and he never managed to live up to the pedestal he was put on, but felt as if he had to say things to make up for his short comings. 

 

By no means am I saying he was rubbish, but he never lived up to the status, and this article even states Fable wasn't his game. 

 

Your point about the devs there was the thing that annoyed me about the shortened rip off article, where so much has been spoken about yet people are fixated on a very tiny aspect out of a huge conversation with barely any context. 

 

I'm not the greatest fan of MS, but the article was pure clickbait.



Mad55 on 13 May 2016
kitler53 said:
as bad as this sounds...


...there aren't a lot of black female gamers compared to white male gamers. marketing has a valid point here. is it racist and sexist to not want to market a product with blacks or women? absolutely. but the market is made of of racist and sexist people. it sucks but i don't think disney or ms is obligated to risk their profits to try and change the world.

Disney is the same company that was gonna pull movie production out of georgia if some stupid discriminatory law got passed. Can't pick and choose and expct to be taken seriously. 



Lawlight on 13 May 2016
Jega said:
This is why there is a lack of fresh new games and innovation.

I suspect it is not just at Microsoft, probably happening at other major publishers.

What the eff, let the creators effing create.

That doesn't make sense to me. How does the character race bring in freshness and innovation?



Lawlight on 13 May 2016
COKTOE said:
KLXVER said:

This happens all the time unfortunately. Just like Sony not wanting a black James Bond.

In movies? ummmm, I think TOO many characters have been fiddled with in recent years. Especially in the superhero genre. And why always, always black? How about a Thai Hero/Villain? Indian? Ultimately, I think most of it should be left alone. Creating some new characters would be a radical idea, instead of messing around with well established characters by changing their ethnicity for seemingly no other reason than to do it. A Bond of a different ethnicity would be a-ok, as it's kind of accepted that there is no ONE bond anyways.

This is always my big question - why does diversity always mean black?