We're seriously reducing years of corporate decisions, expensive development cycles, failed business strategies, and management problems to a culture-war narrative about progressive developers supposedly destroying everything or a divisive reboot from 13 years ago?

Yes, and they believe talking about the actual material reasons why these studios have gone to shit is just cope/distraction from the fact that they were actually brought low by the apathy and or wrath of spurned gamers because they had hired too many blue-haired consultants who hate gamers that put too many trans characters in their games

It's like arguing with flat earthers, don't bother

Gamerism is treatlerism.

Gamers don’t have empathy. They just consume.

Well https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be

The people who worked at [...] aren't a hivemind

If your observation is from social media, it's bots or incels, which are a hivemind, and the algo has your number. Go outside, talk to somebody not wearing a MAGA hat with a job and something to lose, or who had and lost a job. You'll find more than empathy, you'll find solidarity.

I see this discussion mostly going on how other communities/people's are engaging with the layoffs. It's weird to talk about it as something only the chuds do then you look at the other thread here and it's still largely people talking about how they didn't like the recent games. It's whatever but I struggle with the dissonance between calling out the chuds for their lack of empathy and looking at our own threads.

I had some less than kind words myself when it came to id software. Mostly because I was annoyed of them still being celebrated as that legendary studio for it's earliest work. But also some of the founders being raging reactionaries and the whole Microsoft/BDS situation.

Because the Gamergate types blame everything bad that happens in the game industry on Woke DEI, in order to prevent them from developing class consciousness and realising that the reason things are always shit in the gaming industry is because of capitalism. A beloved studio getting destroyed by shortsighted corporate greed is obviously a bad thing, but it's ok if it isn't a corporation and it happened because they are "woke" and therefore deserve it.

Another certified NoahFuel classic.

Chuds blaming everything but capital. The system is functioning as intended.

These anti-woke losers have always been tourists. Women, POC and queer people have always been a part of gaming. Many of us longer than half these "Western gaming has fallen" types have been alive. I refuse to let them claim gaming. They're larpers

They are spoiled arseholes who think everybody should bend over to them because they "vote with their dollar". It's hard to build empathy when mommy and daddy shelter them from the real world and turn everybody else into others.

As marxists, the state of the gaming industry is a good teaching point for anybody willing to listen. As profitability inevitably declines throughout the economy, we will begin to see extreme moves like in the industry that many once thought would be impossible due to competition. But the stakeholders, growing fewer and few have no competition. They own it all and work in the same direction to maximize their take from everything. They don't need your money from games when they are going to take when you are filling up your car or heating your home.

Gamergate informed me as to the problem with gaming, and why I quit identifying as a gamer.

For whatever reason the imaginary worlds of video games have become more important to many; more important than the real world we inhabit. I'm all for amusement and entertainment, storytelling and play. But I'm not interested in the invective created to drive interest in any of it.

The best way to disengage with that aspect of video games that I have found is to disengage with the industry and its fanatics.

I had to find new things to express identity. And I am grateful to myself for it.

This behavior is literally why developers stop caring if they upset gamers; if you're not on their side when they need you, they'll remember that the next time you cry that the main protagonist is a woman, or that she's not anime looking

They're right-wing hogs whose entire politics, to the extent it exists, is based on mass suffering of those they dislike. They do not care about anyone or anything other than treats.

This is of course different from my reveling in the suffering of right-wingers when something bad happens to them, because they're genocidal maniacs.

empathy takes us further from god