WTF, is the need to use video game characters as arousal material for masturbation some kind of essential feature for commercial success now? Weird.

Video Game characters do not need to look like me, but I do need to have them look appealing. Cool, charming, sexy, cute, funny, it can be many things but it needs to trigger a positive emotion. The Concorde characters, to me, trigger nothing at all except boredom.

I have just read the article posted on June 2024 about tweets from June 2020 back when the country was having heated arguments over racial issues., Even though it's not why you linked the article, but I'll by commenting on this quote first: 

Former World of Warcraft Team Lead Mark Kern also stated, “Concord, the new game by Firewalk Studios is so focused on ‘inclusive’ teams that they forgot the white guys in their game. Inclusive should not mean racists against white people, but it too often does.”

This enforces my point, the level of discourse around the game is disgusting. There is a white male character in the game, even if there wasn't, if we are going to say Concord is racist against white people because the cast is completely non-white, then this argument can be flipped against games with non-inclusive cast, either argument is stupid to make. Not to mention, outside of the cast, Concord's story and lore do nothing to push any political agenda, non at all, so for this ex WoW leader to be paranoid about non-existent anti-white racism is frankly psychotic. 

Now to the comments made by the lead Concord designer, which to be fair to you, is the reason why you provided me with the link.

I have gone through them. I personally don't like this rhetoric at all, it's simply not applicable in an age when all young people are struggling to get a decent paying job, buy a house, get healthcare, and poverty on the rise across all ethnicities in the country. Certainly it is the case in the UK. So when some privileged journalist, TV anchor, game designer or a YouTube commentator etc, start telling white people to acknowledge their privilege, the same people who are struggling to save up because rentals are too high, I don't blame them when they feel insulted, what fucking privilege are you talking about. This rhetoric is alienating, and it trivialises the daily struggles of a large chunks of societies based on skin colour.  The only people who benefit from this is the political class and the rich who thrive on division.

I am also not anti-police, the only people who suffer when the police isn't doing their job is the poor and the middle class, so I have little sympathy for law breakers spreading disorder and crime who end up occasionally brutalised by the police, play stupid games and win stupid prizes, some call that excessive but look at what happens when the pendulum swings to the other side and you end up with a completely dysfunctional police units, regular people suffer, people living in mansions are not affected. 

So overall, I clearly don't agree with these tweets from 2020. But it doesn't make the lead designer of concord, Jon, an asshole for sharing his opinions, if anything, he comes across as a caring person with good intentions. He's not a politician, he's not a political commentator, he's not a news anchor, he's a person on twitter who designed characters in a game that literally no one is forced to buy, whether his work is motivated by a cause he wants to champion or not, it doesn't matter, all artists channel what they believe in through some of their work. Don't like? don't buy. 

I just looked up his twitter profile, unsurprisingly, he's being trolled to hell and back for every tweet he posts, this is wrong, online bullying is a a real thing. Vote with your wallet and don't buy the game, leave a negative review if you want. Don't go harassing employees in a volatile industry with volatile jobs on social media for something you are not forced to buy, they're not freaking George Clooney. 

Moreover, even though I find some of the tweets in the article cringe-worthy, I have been recently asking myself just how complicit I am in the genocide taking place in Gaza, with our government refusing to stop shipping arms to a super far ultra right crazy religious fanatics who are outspoken about their mission to kill innocent people and steal their lands. Am I doing enough to stop it? I feel like I should do more, so I kinda relate to how Jon felt even if I disagree with how he went on about expressing it in some of those 4 year old tweets (I don't mind the way he expressed in Concord though, he designed characters, who cares). 

As for the other developer trolling back the trolls, if you see their twitter feed you will understand why they're "hitting back". This is what's happening: a bunch of trolls harassing regular devs (not rich Hollywood stars) on twitter non stop waiting for a reaction, then they got a screenshot of those reactions to validate their uncivilised behaviour and shout SEE? THESE PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES, HATE THEM SOME MORE. I also find the article you linked to be written in bad faith, going on a deleted-tweets-hunt and writing a hit piece based on 4 year old tweets... smh. 

Can you honestly not see how pathological and psychotic this is? This isn't real criticism or feedback, be real and check their twitter feeds for yourself. 

"Don't like? Don't buy" is exactly what happened; nobody liked Concord, so nobody bought it, not white people, not black people, not men, not women, not liberals, not conservatives, nobody.

If anything, despite the political debates over it, Concord arguably unites basically everybody under the banner of "we don't want this."

I'm not condoning harassing the devs for the record, that's obviously not cool. For a game that's pretty much universally disliked though, all negative feedback can't just be written off as trolling.

Funny that you use that wording because that is exactly how many people are feeling about the DEI movement.

The sad part is that this movement is actually making more harm than good to minorities and representation, as we are now seeing a push back stronger than ever before against "diversity", and I'm telling you this as a non-white, non-straight guy.

If you look back a little, there has always been female characters in video games (Tomb Raider, Metroid, Resident Evil franchise, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instict, heck, every single fighting game in existence has had female characters in it) and there has always been non-white guys in videogames (about a third of all video games are made in Asia, for God's sake) and please do not tell me that you ever heard anyone complaining about Chun-Li, Kitana or Jax.

Like I said before, Internet has made it difficult for decision makers to discern who exactly the "loud minority" really is, but I think they are starting to figure it out. I just hope that we don't see a pendulum effect now, with everybody going into the other extreme, when they conclude that this DEI insanity has been making them lose money.

You can't honestly say even if there weren't whites in the game it would be fine. That would not be inclusive, and the apparent message to white people or majorities is that games have too many majorities and white people and need to be more inclusive of minorities.

Well while being given the chance, leaving white people out, or even turning them into the minority, could easily suggest to white people that, 'we're just gunna do the same to you, as we believe you've done to us, as long as we have the ability to.'

If you're a white person, majority, or just somebody who truly believes in inclusivity, then obviously this isn't going to fly, and will be fought against. Even worse, if you have a problem like having too many whites in games, and you make whites think they're going to get left out in the future, you really don't think they might not decide to just leave things the way they already were in that case?

Peoples word matters. Accuracy matters. Follow through matters. This is a major reason why mainstream news is suffering, and it applies to almost everything.

If inclusivity doesn't need to be in everything, and doesn't need to be 100% equal in every game, then that shouldn't ever be voiced as a concern, and if it is by some by chance, we should see a clear constructive reaction against them. That's not what typically happens though.

As for the trolling tweets and non constructive criticism, that's obviously not acceptable. But when it comes to the majority voicing their opinion through social media, there's another clear hypocrisy here that doesn't seem to be obvious to some. 

When the minority speaks up through social media because they have a problem they want solved, that's seen by them as acceptable, yet when the majority does the same thing, that's seen by the minority as unacceptable. In a world where we apparently are supposed to be shooting for inclusivity and equality, you can't be against the majority voicing concerns. You can disagree with them, but you shouldn't have a problem with it, yet it seems at least some of the minority do.

Even worse, devs or the minority lashing out in retaliation just makes them seem just as bad if not worse from a general perspective. Yes, they may not have started it, and it may have been some of the majority who were being complete jerks, but lashing out in response is not a smart civilized way of dealing with that and will hurt the minority or the game in this instance in the end.

We're just as bad as you is a terrible look. We're above that and won't stoop to those levels is what people have respect for and want to see.

DEI is not about diversity and inclusivety. It's about the Mirage of it.

It's born from the obsession to compartmentalize people in easily identifiable checkboxes. A spreadsheet in other words.

Let's put a Nigerian, Senegalese and Aboriginal all in the color coded bucket 'black', because of something arbitrary as similar shade of skin color. Totally ignoring their vastly different cultures. Then pretend if Samual L. Jackson stars in a Marvel movie, the Aboriginal feels representation. Where the truth is that Aboriginal feels more represented by Paul Hogan playing Crocodile Dundee.

There are thousands of different ethnicities and none of them are called 'white' or 'black'. And certainly not 'people of color'. Lazily trowing them in the same buckets and pretending that if every bucket is checkboxed is somehow representative of all, actually kills real diversity.

Fantastic perspective and one I’ve never considered. Thank you! I find myself agreeing with you.

From my own life, I’m a gay man, but does that mean I get along better with gay men? Not even close. I certainly don’t feel “represented” by stereotyped depictions of gay guys and I don’t feel “more included” because a character happens to be gay. The characters I most enjoy and aspire towards are often not what I am, but how I would like to be. The “LGBTQ” whatever alphabet community don’t represent me or my opinions or beliefs at all, and I wish the loud minority would stop telling the world that they do. 

Is this thread even on-topic anymore or is it just a whinge about DEI/Woke?

The actual reasons why Concord have failed have been posted numerous times, now we're seemingly just ranting about how everything is woke, ranting about DEI, ranting about our friends being upset with us, that the UK is apparently locking everyone up, etc. Games dead, Christ. Move on. Some of you should be happy that the imaginary villain in your mind was defeated. This thread will be complaining about DEI/Woke longer than the game was alive at this rate. Not even progressives who care about DEI cared about this game this much because the game was mid at its core.

I can't wait for the next game to fail in the list of thousands of other games which failed for people to angrily find a single reason to latch onto and scream "DEI! WOKE!" while at the same time ironically complaining about those on the opposite side who label everything as racist. Also, I saw stuff a few pages back, I'm not sure exactly what the conversation was getting at but I'll just make clear to be safe that the site won't tolerate bigotry against anyone and that includes trans-people so any *on purpose* misgendering of people will be a moderation, a reminder of the rules.

This thread is goddamn obsessed with an imaginary villain.

Is this the level of discussion we can expect for future games that aren't full with white male characters and fail? Nobody has yet to prove to me that Concord had DEI writing consultants and that one dude in the game looks white as fuck to me, looks like a generic white dude I would say as a white dude and no, him being Latino/Hispanic does not mean he isn't white.

This post reads like one of those parents who pretend not to notice when their child hits someone but throws an absolute fit when the other kid hits back.

Still, it's kind of funny that you can get all indignant here but someone wishes fucking murder on millions of people and that's not a big deal.  Yeah, I'm pretty damn sure that you do tolerate bigotry here. 

But, hey, you want everyone to shut up if they don't agree with your one-sided exaggerations?  Loud and clear.  Also, I've love to know who you're accusing and threatening in that last paragraph.