Man, I like TF2 a lot. The SP campaign and honestly that years CoD is the only Cod I ever liked. I get a spaceship! But TF2 was the the second best FPS that year behind Doom. To think the best FPS games that year have some of the best movement in the genre.

It's kinda funny how ravenous you got when someone even references Sbi.  The long-winded diatribe didn't really address much at all.  Maybe they should focus on games rather than culture war crap. Not that hard. Also Alan Wake 2 failed and Spider-Man had some great momentum from the original game which luckily was less influenced in the writing by such firms. If they're not influencing things I guess don't hire them.  Sounds like a useless thing to do 

Funny that they cancelled factions but thought releasing this garbage was a good idea

Kind of funny how you consistently post utter nonsense around these forums and never back your points up. Good thing for your paranoid delusions, SBI had nothing to do with Concord. Maybe you should learn how videogame development works rather than saying "they should focus on games rather than culture war crap" because clearly you don't understand that a tiny consultancy group focused on giving advice on how best to implement inclusive characters does nothing to take away the many areas of developing a videogame.

Please, enlighten us, how does receiving advice on how to write a black character into a videogame with care take away focus from creating mechanics and gameplay features, content and graphics, art-style and technical? In your little mind SBI with their few consultancy workers interfere in studios with 100-200+ employees. You sound like one of those Twitter warriors who scream at social media managers to "focus on the games instead of tweeting" Lol.

Alan Wake 2 has yet to turn a profit, for no reason to do with SBI and more to do with the fact that Alan Wake is a large budget game that isn't a massive seller right out the gate, Alan Wake 1 took 5 years to sell 4.5m copies. Alan Wake 2 was Remedy’s fastest selling game as of February 2024. In 4 months it had sold 1.3m and it would have done even more had it not been exclusive to Epic Game Store.

You ought to look up how Epic Games Publishing contracts work too, EGP cover 100% of development costs (including salaries, QA, localization, marketing, etc.) and developers under these contracts will only earn profit once the costs have been recouped to Epic. Basically, Epic has to make back its investment before Remedy starts receiving profits. So even though Remedy has yet to turn a profit on Alan Wake 2, all the costs were covered by Epic anyway and they'll only start making profit once Epic receives all of its costs back.

Either way, I'll say again, Alan Wake 2 was very well received by both critics and fans. Spider-Man 2 the same, God of War Ragnarök the same. But of course, SBI is only responsible for the bad and you'll come up with an excuse for every good game they've been involved in when the actual truth is that SBI barely has an impact on the quality and sales of any videogame.

And I'll say again, SBI had nothing to do with Concord.

But it won't stop the obsessed running in with low-educated takes of "FAIL CAUSE WOKE/DEI AGENDA"

Nah, it has nothing to do with SBI. Spouting any kind of nonsense is going to get people responding.

And Ryuu writes a lot to anything.  

That's really not possible. 

The problem is, that people are selective about what is considered the culture war. 

Call of Duty is an inherently political game. War happens for political reasons, it is political. 

A lot of your "culture war crap" is just people trying to feel included. Black people trying to have game characters that look like them. Women trying to have game characters that look like them. 

No one had any idea who SBI was, until certain people started making lists of games they were involved with to avoid. 

Talking about different things. 

They're a consultant firm to help make inclusive writing. It could even help conservatives at times. "Your game frequently uses Christians as punching bags, just as a suggestion, you may want to tone it down." And then the studio goes back to rewrite those things, or they send some suggestions on how to make those parts more palatable.

That's basically what they do. They're not some magic corporation that single handedly influences any part of the industry. 

*Looks at Bungie*

Wasn't it Bungie that partly influenced Sony to cancel Factions? And Sony was asking Bungie to look at their portfolio of GAAS titles? I'm genuinely curious what Bungie thought of Concord now and if they said it would be a hit. Though again, there's still Helldivers 2 and that was a huge success but honestly at this stage, it's pretty damn obvious that Factions would have been hugely more popular than Concord. Someone cancelled Factions but went ahead with Concord.

I'm sure it mainly had to do with the fact that Naughty Dog had eggs in other baskets (remakes, remasters, PC ports, and new single player games) and could afford to cancel a project pretty deep in development, whereas Concord was the only game Firewalk was working on and by the time they were purchased by Sony and was given to Bungie to evaluate how the game would perform as a live service, the game was nearly 7 years into development with an unknown budget of millions of dollars already invested. I've read rumors that the budgets was upwards of $150 million over the course of the 8 years.

So from Sony's perspective, it was either let the game release and hope that it would at least recoup some of the investment or cancel the game the studio worked on for many years, have them start on their next game from scratch, and have it be closer to a decade by the time Firewalk releases their first game. 

Bungie had questions about long term play, and Naughty Dog apparently took it to heart and cancelled the game. 

There was a little bit more information in his article last year. 

Hard to say exactly what the issue with Factions was.

Some people think maybe the game was just bad to play.

I think given what Naughty Dog is structured around, the issue was probably scaling up the game. ND usually spends massive budgets on ~20 hour games. Not really conducive to making games that people play for 1000 hours. 

Doesn't Activision have an alt-right Maga person as a consultant on CoD games or they did for a bit? I recall hearing something some years back. I'm not an expert on the CoD series. So I ask with no alternative motives. Do you ever play as someone other than a white generic US military man? Do you ever play as someone not in some form of the US Military?


I don't know enough about SBI to have any real opinion on it. Indifferent atm. Tho for all the angry mobs over it. I'd be more worried if hateful people were consultants on popular games.

Several non-US or non-white playable characters in CoD games:

• CoD 3- Bohater, a Polish tank crewman, and James Doyle, a UK Royal Airforce Airmen
• CoD Modern Warfare series (original trilogy and reboot trilogy)- Price and Soap, both UK soldiers
• CoD WaW- Dimitri, a Russian soldier
• CoD MW2 (2009)- Ramirez, a latino US Army Ranger
• CoD MW3 (2011)- Yuri, a former Russian Spetsnaz operative
• CoD Modern Warfare reboot trilogy- Gaz, a black British soldier