| IkePoR said: God of War and Alan Wake are, obviously, two known and proven IP's. Spider-Man is the single most popular Marvel character and arguably most recognizable comic book character of all time. I wouldn't say conveniently ignored, I'd say "take into account" before mentioning. I would agree with you that SBI isn't some boogey-man gamers should be losing sleep over. I will say there is a heavy, HEAVY correlation with their involvement and games flopping. It is certainly something to consider. Games do need to be more competitive and have a special element - a huge marketing budget doesn't hurt either. When it comes to the whole "woke" idea... it's simple, really. I believe "woke" to be a metric of progressive morals in which your game must measure it's excellence against. Balders Gate 3 is considered quite woke, yet it's excellence shines far brighter and was easy to sell the game on in trailers. Hogwarts Legacy has the trans character, something the anti-woke hates, but again, it's Harry Potter and it's quite the decent time and again, easy to market. The challenge with a Concord, I believe, is marketing. It's hard to market a game that has characters that look like people that certain groups hate. How large is that group? Not easy to know but if we assume a silent minority also agrees with them, you create an osmosis of bandwagon effects. People who aren't even anti-woke glom onto the opinion without even thinking because it's on vouge - "woke crap" sounds funny, and lots of people are memeing on it, so yeah I hate it too. The most notorious example I think I can give is Donald Trump winning in 2016. How do you convince Overwatch players to pay $40 to try out Concord instead of them just continuing to play Overwatch? - I don't know how much Sony and Firewalk considered this or if they asked themselves at all. When it comes down to it, I think I partly agree with you - it's not "woke" killing these games, it's incompetence, a far more common and obvious idea to understand. |
Removed my quoted post because it screwed up with huge spacing.
My point in mentioning God of War, Alan Wake, Spiderman are more that all 3 of them had SBI's involvement and yet all 3 were widely well received by both critics and fans so if SBI is responsible for the bad like some like to claim then they must be responsible for the good too, they can't pick and choose what they're responsible for when it suits them.
However, I don't believe they're responsible either way, as they are a 16 employee consultancy studio, they have no real power over these developers, they offer advice and advice doesn't have to be implemented, their input in the grand scheme of things will be minor to the overall product of the videogame, plus SBI is just one of dozens of consultancy agencies, there's likely dozens of consultancy agencies providing studios with tips on inclusion but SBI is the current target of peoples hate because it's the one people can notice right now.
Other games SBI has been involved with were equally poorly received by reviewers, the same people complaining about SBI would also tell you about how reviewers are biased too and trying to ram their "political agenda" down your throat, now if that was true, why would the reviewers give these games bad scores? Flinctlock for example has a 69 OpenCritic, Suicide Squad has a 59 OpenCritic. The reason they failed is easily explained by the fact that they are simply not good enough titles at their core.
In regards to Concord, I'm here defending SBI and inclusion but even I don't think Concord's characters looked good, the character designs were boring, bland, etc. That has a larger impact than "being things that certain groups hate" They're simply boring, as Hiku mentioned, Overwatch has just as much LGBTQ characters and diversity but their characters are well designed.
I think we're mostly in agreement, though I wouldn't put it all down to incompetence, sometimes even good games don't sell well. All throughout gaming history games have failed for various reasons, whether because their market was too hard to get into, or yes, poor leadership and development. Only now games apparently only fail cause "Woke/DEI" Lol.
I think even if Concord was a great title with appealing characters it would have had a tough battle to compete with the big boys like Overwatch. This is partly why I believe Sony approved so many GAAS...They know a bunch will fail, they're going to throw them all at the wall until something sticks, Helldivers 2 stuck, Concord failed, onto the next GAAS. Until they have a few long-running, high-income producing GAAS titles.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 26 August 2024
