Greed is ruining video games, not “DEI”

Last week, Bungie laid off over 200 people from across their different lines of business. The stated reason for the layoffs, both on the front end through CEO/shitty car collector Pete Parsons and through backchannel reporting by folks like Jason Schreier and Paul Tassi, was that Bungie had overextended itself: “a company that grew too fast and tried to develop too many projects at once, spreading resources too thin rather than prioritizing its chief moneymaker, Destiny 2,” according to Schreier’s reporting. Case closed, mystery solved: capitalist greed once again kneecaps a group of creative people in the process of making something unique that people will enjoy. It’s a tragic, infuriating, but all-too-common story in video games especially, where you could make a genuine bona fide hit for a company like Microsoft and still find your entire studio shut down a year later.

But to a certain musty corner of the Internet, Bungie’s layoffs signified something else entirely. To hear this sector of Online tell it, in the dankest, darkest replies of ex-Bungie employees’ social media posts and on various niche sites owned by self-styled “rosary warriors,” the layoffs were just the inevitable result of Bungie catering to marginalized people, both in their internal culture and in Destiny 2‘s narrative itself.

“Multiple Woke Activists And Sweet Baby Inc. Defenders Laid Off As Part Of Bungie’s Massive Downsizing,” one headline reads. The story this headline is attached to goes on to detail how each “woke activist” or “Sweet Baby Inc. defender” that was let go contributed to “ruining” Destiny 2, with such sordid details as former senior narrative designer Robert Brookes “[pushing] homosexual relationships based on his own fan fiction and lifestyle” into the game, and former activity designer Max Nichols calling people who went after Sweet Baby Inc. “murderous white supremacists.” Real bombshell shit, right?

The article concludes: “While many woke activists and ideologues have been laid off from Bungie, it does not appear that the company is eschewing the ideology altogether. Given this, it’s unlikely that the company will be able to recover as gamers have made it abundantly clear they are not interested in woke ideology being injected into video games.”

“I can fix Bungie and Destiny,” one 57-year-old game designer commented on social media following the layoffs. “Stick a hot chick in it, make it less gay and lame.” Said designer’s current project, announced in 2016, has no expected release date.

The worst bit of this is, of course, the fact that these weird shitheads are celebrating the demise of people who were, for all intents and purposes, randomly fired. Beyond that, though: you can see a pattern of these same assholes saying the exact same shit about other, similar layoffs or game failures. For months – let’s face it, years – they’ve been bloviating about the presence of “DEI consultants” and “woke” in games, and they latch onto any queer pride flag in a dev’s profile header or pronouns in bio as the reason why a particular game sucked or why a particular company let people go.

Pointing out trivia – like the fact that Destiny 2 has always featured queer people in its narrative and there have always been queer people working on it – doesn’t work and it doesn’t matter. It almost literally never matters. As Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante wrote, this week it’s “woke activists” being fired from Bungie; “[last] week it was Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Before that it was a content warning added to a Capcom game. Before that it was the perceived failure of Flintlock. Before that it was a female lead in a Star Wars game not being hot enough. Before that it was a Black lead in a Star Wars show merely existing.” And on, and on, and on and on and on.

This is all in spite of the fact that we know – and we can see, and we can prove – that the real rot at the heart of the games industry is simply greed. It’s the unsustainable arch-capitalist drive towards growth at any cost. It’s the absolutely predictable cycle of “publisher buys a bunch of studios, those studios don’t instantly produce a return on publisher’s investment, publisher closes a bunch of the studios it just bought and fires a bunch of the developers who worked there in order to cut costs and maximize profits.” This cycle is so fucking visible that when Microsoft closed Tango and Arkane Austin and announced changes to its Game Pass product, the fucking Federal Trade Commission called them out on it in a letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The oft-cited example of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League being “woke” is especially fascinating to me, as I’d been hearing low groaning about the state of that game well before it came out to a critical and commercial panning. Why is it so hard to believe that the core of that game’s failure lies squarely at the feet of Warner Bros. for wanting it to be a pretty generic live service looter shooter at the tail end of that fad’s life cycle? Why is it somehow easier to believe that “woke consultants” killed it? (I mean, we do know why.) Greed killed that game in the crib. It’s clear as day.

Maybe the issue here is that there isn’t much we as casual consumers of games can do about greed. Developers and mo-cap/voice actors can unionize and/or go on strike to keep the greed from degrading working conditions and prevent executives from absolutely ratfucking them out of severance packages in the event of still-seemingly-inevitable layoffs. Consumers can “vote with their wallet” – an idea employed by the anti-woke crowd often – but counterintuitively, when it comes to the discarding of human labor, whether or not a commercial product is successful doesn’t seem to matter at all. Maybe all success guarantees is how many fewer people get laid off; it doesn’t stop them from happening at all. It’s clear a more radical, more systemic change needs to take place.

Of course, the anti-woke crowd doesn’t want to hear about changing the socioeconomic system to benefit everyone and eliminate the disastrous effects of rampant greed; that’s a “woke” concept to them. And so the cycle continues.