Gamergate is back.
At least that’s how Wired magazine characterizes the current backlash against DEI in the video game industry. Never mind that the backlash is happening everywhere in the culture — in gaming there’s a special name for it.
The failure of Concord may be historic, but it’s far from an isolated case. Woke games failing is the norm for the industry.
Just what do people in this “online hate group” do? According to Wired, they express their preference for games “without minorities or queer characters, [with] fictional women they think are attractive, and … [without] leftist political agendas.”
Just like the original Gamergate 10 years ago.
The before times
I’m old enough to remember the original Gamergate. In fact, I was part of it — not that I knew it at the time. Back in the early 2010s, there was nothing political about video games. What mattered was the experience a game created, not the ideology it supposedly represented.
That all went without saying … until the left showed up.
Suddenly, leftists were everywhere, in what seemed like a concerted effort to capture the industry. Figures like Anita Sarkeesian, Laura Kate Dale, and others came into the public spotlight, decrying video games as “problematic.”
Gaming sites such as Kotaku and Polygon — amplified by general interest publications like the Guardian — began calling out the industry as “too white and too male.” Games needed to be more “diverse” and “LGBTQ-friendly.”
Of course, this was just the latest front in a long-running culture war that had been raging in Hollywood and academia for years. But nobody was there to tell me that. I was in high school, and all I knew was that there were a bunch of annoying people calling me sexist, racist, and every slur in the book just because I wanted my entertainment to be left alone.
And at the time, I thought it would be left alone — eventually. After all, these people were clearly crazy radicals — surely common sense would ultimately win out. Moreover, didn’t game companies realize no one wanted these changes? Didn’t they realize they were hurting their bottom line? Go woke, go broke … right?
Turns out my optimism was a little premature.
A fake revolution
The good news is the people complaining about “Gamergate 2.0” don’t seem nearly as energetic as they did a decade ago. Maybe because it’s hard to play the oppressed minority now that everyone realizes how fake the DEI revolution was.
Thanks to the DOGE, we are starting to see the extent to which “wokeness” was propped up by the United States government.
Now, we can begin to answer the questions that have puzzled us at least since the debacle that was “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” Why were the vast majority of game studios willing to nonchalantly torch every IP they possessed? Why was every movie production more than happy to burn decades of goodwill and franchise investment? For what reason did our entire culture self-immolate?
It’s because the left is essentially one huge, top-down patronage network with billions of taxpayer dollars — our dollars — in its coffers.
Even with the DOGE’s tireless efforts, I don’t think we’ll ever have an idea of the full scope of it all. So much has been coming out so fast, with headlines so insane that they’d seem over-the-top even in satirical publications like the Onion and the Babylon Bee.
And they made us pay for it.
What was it all for?
I’m not saying everything bad that happened was a result of USAID — no, of course not. But what I am saying is billions have been spent funding explicitly leftist causes. And the staggering scale of these networks cannot be overestimated.
Oddly enough, I find myself looking back in melancholy rather than rage at the rampant abuse. What was it all for? I suppose I am a bit burnt out, having fought this fight for years. When I hear of the next scandal, the next outrage, it’s hard for me to muster much more energy than to shrug my shoulders. Every now and again on X, I hear, “The left did WHAT?!”
As a Zoomer in my mid-20s, I roll my eyes. I’ve heard this story a thousand times before, each time more egregious than the last. The left did that? Of course it did. And then I wait for the next scandal.
But I keep coming back to this question: What was it all for?
The case for woke
When the woke activists were shouting for inclusion and diversity, they made two arguments for why we should support their cause.
The first was that wokeness was the moral thing to do — it was the sensible politics of the person “on the right side of history.” Any good, decent individual would logically support diversity, inclusion, and leftist ideology. Of course we should make entertainment woke!
The second argument, the one that grates my nerves more, is that video games should be more woke because it would make video games better.
We were going to get a new generation of entertainment that was going to appeal to everyone, games that were more immersive, more mechanically complex. We were going to get stories with deeper, more compelling themes. We were going to get a new wave of protagonists to fall in love with.
And we were going to improve old games by updating them to modern sensibilities. The future was bright, as long as we became more liberal — or so we were assured by every activist whining about the dangers of racism and bigotry.
So how did that turn out?
Look no further than the example of recent mega-flop Concord.
A triple-A disaster
Concord, a “Guardians of the Galaxy”-inspired multiplayer, first-person shooter was what’s know in the industry as a “triple-A” game — a high-profile, big-budget project published by a major company — in this case, Sony.
Firewalk Studios developed Concord over eight years. While some dispute the game’s reported $400 million budget, it’s clear that it was extremely well-funded. It was meant to be a blockbuster, establishing a universe that would sustain sequels and spin-offs for years to come.
It was also a perfect example of the “new” era in gaming leftists have been pushing. It wasn’t just woke, it was painfully woke — right down to the deliberately unattractive character designs (including the option of “top surgery” scars) and irritating pronoun choices.
It was so bad that any reasonable studio exec should’ve known this project was going to fail at first glance.
I don’t want to place all the blame on wokeness. The game design of Concord was bad enough even without the progressive touches, and the market for hero shooters was oversaturated.
Still, it says something that so many people hated the game even before playing it. On launch day, this game that cost hundreds of millions to make had less than 700 players.
For comparison, “Kingdom Come: Deliverance II,” a game developed on a $40 million budget, had a concurrent player count of 256,000.
The failure of Concord may be historic, but it’s far from an isolated case. Woke games failing is the norm for the industry. I can cite several major examples off the top of my head: Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Saints Row, Starfield, Star Wars Outlaws, Forspoken, Dustborn, Wolfenstein II, etc., etc.
Now, I’m not arguing that these games failed purely for their politics. What I am saying is that the intrusion of politics is one of the main reasons that the video game industry is facing titanic collapse.
Going for broke
Ten thousand developers were laid off in 2023 alone, and 2024 was even worse. I’ve frankly lost track of the number of studios shutting down. It seems the bill for aggressive DEI initiatives — for hiring for diversity instead of for talent and competency — has come due.
It’s not only that games are more woke than they have ever been before, it’s also the people making them. I would challenge any person to look at a picture of a famous game studio from 20 years ago and compare it with now. You’ll notice some glaring differences.
In one sense, the liberals have succeeded. The industry in 2025 looks a lot different from the days when it was wall-to-wall boring white guys running the show.
But are gamers better off? Were all of the charges of racism and bigotry and sexism worth it? What about all of the lives ruined and companies bankrupted? Or all the destroyed customer trust? Or the many terrible games that have been released in the past 10 years?
In my opinion, no. The people attempting to drive what remains of the industry into the ground with their delusional, self-centered ideological obsessions no doubt disagree.
Gamergate, Video games, Dei, Isaac young, Doge, Elon musk, Trans, Culture
