For the past few months, video game studios have been laying off their staff in staggering numbers. RIOT Games just announced that are laying off 530 workers. Another site reports that 5,000 workers have been laid off in 2024 and we’re still only in January. Microsoft just announced that 1900 video game workers are being laid off just months after their $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Another site estimated that 10,500 people were laid off in 2023.
The video game industry and its shills in the media are blaming everything from artificial intelligence to the rapacious greed of CEOs. I am not convinced. The truth is so explosive, that they dare not reveal it.
What is it?
I believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda is responsible for the mass layoffs. Hiring unqualified minorities and alphabet people instead of hiring by merit produced bad video games which hurt the bottom line. Gamers voted with their feet and their wallets. Therefore, the only conclusion one can draw is that declining revenues are the real reason.
Gamers don’t care about your good intentions; gamers will not buy your shitty games.
In the days, weeks, and months ahead, let’s see how many streamers, YouTubers, pundits, and video game journalists have the courage to contemplate this or even admit it. Instead, they will perform great feats of mental gymnastics to prove they are not racist, not sexist, not homophobic, and not transphobic.
Since the death of George Floyd and the moral panic that ensured, almost every video game studio has gone woke to the point of absurdity. Studios pledged millions of dollars to BLM and made sanctimonious statements about racism and diversity on social media. Making great video games became secondary to virtue signaling and moral exhibitionism.
Straight white males — the main demographic that plays video games — also are the only demographic that is truly capable of making video games. But, the video game industry systematically discriminated against them and stopped hiring them. Companies like Activision-Blizzard even engaged in ageism and fired older white male employees as I reported in a previous article.
The bottom line is that the video game-buying public will not buy crappy games. If you hire developers based on identity instead of merit, you will invariably end up with bad games that nobody wants to play. People vote with their wallets, they don’t care how virtuous or woke you are. All they care about is if your game is good.
You can not continue to insult straight white male gamers with various woke shenaningans like eliminating male and female characters, creating ugly flat-chested women, blackwashing, race swapping, and putting gratuitous LGBTQ characters in video games without facing financial consequences.
I have been warning people for many years about the unintended consequences of political correctness, identity politics DEI, and representation. Once again, my predictions have been proven to be right.
We only have to look at how Elon Musk purchased Twitter and fired 80% of its existing employees and expects to be profitable in 2024. X is now functioning like the digital town square it was always supposed to be. Many Twitter employees had featherbed jobs and were only hired because they were minorities or LGBTQ people.
American corporations that jettisoned merit and replaced it with DEI are being sued for their discriminatory hiring practices and the American public is at risk due to diversity hires. Recent troubling incidents in the aviation industry attest to this. The U.S. military can’t even meet its recruiting goals because wokeness has turned off straight white males. Diversity is not our strength; diversity is our weakness. DEI will destroy Western civilization if it’s not halted.
It’s also important to note that ESG investments lost a staggering $5 trillion in the past 2 years. ESG requires that all companies create diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring targets. The numbers don’t lie. DEI is an unsustainable ideological luxury that will destroy your business. The wisdom of the marketplace is always right.
I believe this is only the beginning. In the next few years, the bloodletting will continue and more jobs will be lost and studios will fold. The party is over.
The moral of the story is that video game companies cared more about virtue signaling and wokeness than they did about making fantastic video games for their players. They broke faith with their loyal players and threw them under the bus. They deserve to fail.
Conclusion
Do I feel sympathy for straight white males who lost their jobs? Of course, I do. Better days are ahead for you because you are the heart and soul of the video game industry. You will prevail.
Do I feel sympathy for those people who got hired because of their identity and just lost their jobs? No, I do not. These imposters deserve no sympathy from anyone. They took jobs from more qualified straight white males. They are co-conspirators and beneficiaries of a diabolical system of oppression and discrimination. The chickens of their malevolence have finally come home to roost. Good riddance and I must admit, I’m enjoying the schadenfreude.
Billions of dollars have been wasted on wokeness and DEI over the past 10 years. Beloved video games and MMOs have been vandalized because of the infusion of neo-Marxist idealogy. Gamers have suffered enough. The video game industry needs to be fundamentally purged of the woke mind virus. This is just the beginning.
Now that the DEI grift is coming to an end, expect to see lots of creepy transgender frauds revert to the biological sex of their birth. Game over. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Now go back home and get your shine box.
–Wolfshead
CEOs and industry leaders might not have believed in the woke agenda, but they nevertheless bowed to it. They thought they can get away with complying, gamers will play the games nevertheless. That’s even true to some degree, but without all the old white men and game design driven by DEI agendas, not even throwing billions and effort at something makes it palatable or great. Amazon Studios for both games and television is a perfect example for this.
I would love to see the free market put DEI into the place where it belongs, the trashbin of history.
The pipe dream of a DEI-fueled Utopia is coming to an end. It turns out, that white men are not optional, they are essential for the civilized world to function. This applies to every field of endeavor from rocket science to game design.
Even Asmongold the streamer is talking about this stuff now. Times are changing.
For the past 60 years, white people have been conditioned to hate themselves. Then throw feminism, civil rights, and Marxism into the equation and we have a recipe for civilizational collapse. This experiment has been a failure as are all experiments that reject God and embrace the state and atheism.
I’m still waiting for an all-female video game studio, an all-black or all-gay studio. Show us what you go or shut the hell up. We all know it will never happen.
Teachers, particularly in elementary school and at universities, are often mostly female and so left-wing that they leave young boys without orientation and even mess up their minds. It’s interesting that these wokeheads seem to sit particularly at the entry and exit points of education. Guess everything in between, teaching real, useful skills, would be just too much. It would also explain how kids can get to the next grade when they can barely read or write or speak the native language. I don’t know about America, but it happens in Europe a lot.
Yes, wokeism is facing a storm, and I can’t wait for them to get blown away. At least I hope so! But I am wary, over here they are using everything at their disposal to stay in power. Though they so often abuse power and do immoral things that they fuel opposition even more.
The left has realized that to control the world, they need to shape the future. The easiest way to do that is to indoctrinate young minds. The teacher’s unions in America and Canada have completely captured the school system which allows them to spread their evil idealogy.
Another huge problem is that administrators now outnumber teachers by a factor of 4 to one in America. So for every professor, there are four admins. This is why education is so expensive in America. Of course, these admins are all woke.
I was just fooling around in my mind saying it in reverse – Get broke, go woke, and it actually got me thinking if there are people who don’t have money and want to have more money and decide that going woke from the get-go will get them the money they want.
Some up-and-coming indie game developer, starts a game, makes it all purple, removes genders, adds some weird political agenda that has no place in the game and hopes to make more money out of it.
I had a similar thought. A lot of people without skills but a lot of hate, envy and loathing indeed flock to such ideologies. They always feel being a victim of something, being a victim empowers them in a woke environment and they can blame anyone but themselves. It is totally sick.