As more gamers in the Anglosphere begin to break free from their consumerist conditioning, they are realizing that the gaming industry they once loved now actively hates them. This has led to the repeated large-scale failures of “woke” games centered around ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) principles.
In light of this, Techland’s Tymon Smektala has spoken out, confirming what many already suspected: an industry crash is imminent.
Techland, the Polish studio primarily known for its Call of Juarez and Dead Island series, distanced itself from the controlling publisher Deep Silver to independently release Dying Light in 2015.
This game, a spiritual successor to their action-adventure open-world survival-horror genre, combined exploration, weapon crafting, and parkour elements. Its success was so significant that it led to the release of a major expansion called “The Following” and a sequel in 2022, although the latter faced various development challenges.
Despite incorporating microtransactions and cosmetics post-release, Dying Light 2 turned out to be a financial loss for the small Polish studio Techland, leading to millions of dollars in losses years after its launch.
The studio also saw the departure of its longtime writer Pawel Selinger in early 2021. Initially announced for a Spring 2020 release, the game faced delays after head writer Chris Avellone was forced to leave the company in June 2020 due to allegations of sexual harassment as yet another example of cancel culture in action.
The departure of these key figures at Techland disrupted the development of Dying Light 2, leading to significant delays and wasted resources, with the game being postponed for nearly two years.
During this period, it appeared that the character of Lawan had been race-swapped, and it is likely that crucial elements of the story, originally written by Chris Avellone and Pawel Selinger, were discarded and rewritten amid the game’s development turmoil.
The game sold over five million units in its first month, but received mixed to negative feedback from players. Despite adding paid microtransactions, Techland still ended up losing money, underscoring the serious challenges facing modern game development.
Techland recently revealed “Dying Light: The Beast,” a short standalone game designed to address the company’s past financial missteps.
Tymon Smektała, Dying Light’s director discussed the project with Gamesindustry.biz Editor-in-Chief James Batchelor, highlighting how the decision to create a smaller, DLC-style standalone game aligns with a growing industry trend where studios release shorter standalone titles alongside their major franchise releases, similar to Insomniac Games’ approach with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
Smektała explained that the first “perspective” by the studio is that of the player.
Smektała pointed out that, from a developer’s standpoint, one of the current challenges in the industry is the ever-increasing size of games. Specifically, their budgets are growing significantly.
Sony, in particular, inadvertently revealed that their first-party narrative-driven games, such as Marvel’s Spider-Man, Horizon Forbidden West, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2, likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, not even including marketing expenses.
Mark Cerny, the chief architect of the PlayStation 5, inadvertently suggested that a major crash might be looming for the video game industry. This is partly due to large-scale game developers, both in the West and internationally, increasingly adhering to BlackRock’s ESG ideology.
This provides short-term financial boosts by emphasizing diversity and inclusivity in games, such as featuring characters from marginalized backgrounds and implementing censorship to avoid discriminatory dialogue.
Additionally, fixations on ESG initiatives seemingly result in the exterminating of traditional female portrayals in gaming, as the liberal feminist game developers of today stigmatizing characters that are remotely attractive as being inherently sexualized and in need of correction, resulting in androgynously ugly blobs that more or less resemble men with tits.
The gaming industry is increasingly resembling a ticking time bomb, with game development now stretching over several years with ease. Major corporations, in their desperation to align with BlackRock’s political initiatives, are compromising creativity and sanitizing their games to cater to “modern audiences.”
They’ve essentially become political captives of profit-driven advocates, like Sweet Baby Inc, who pressure these corporations into investing in DEI consultancy to boost diversity and inclusivity, or face media backlash.
This approach has led to numerous layoffs and studio closures following the commercial failures of games pushing such ideologies, including Volition’s Saints Row Reboot, Square Enix’s Forspoken, and more recently, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Arkane Studio’s Redfall and Sony’s live-service hero shooter Concord.
Tymon Smektała remarked in his interview, “You have 500 people working on a game for five years, and in the end, it might not be successful.”
This observation holds true, as major corporations like Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Take-Two are laying off thousands of employees to stay viable in a market that has become increasingly aware of its shifting target demographic.
Many now perceive that video games are being designed more as propaganda, prioritizing artificial tokenization and inclusivity over fun and entertainment.
In recent years, many developers have mistakenly equated quality with quantity, opting to pad their core experiences with mundane fetch quests and dull open-world exploration.
While Techland can take credit for producing a small-scale standalone expansion, likely using assets from the commercial flop Dying Light 2, this accomplishment is not mirrored by other Western studios, many of which are staffed by individuals whose qualifications seem to hinge on their gender rather than their competence.
Square Enix recently set a new benchmark for game prices with the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, pushing the standard for AAA games from $60 to $70. Given that most modern games launch with numerous bugs, unfinished content, and obligatory adherence to ESG/DEI initiatives, it’s no surprise that many of them are commercial failures.
“If we don’t introduce innovative ideas, games themselves will become monotonous and boring. Additionally, “grand and elaborate” types of software are complex in content, requiring time, labor, and expenses to produce.
Even if billions of yen are invested and a hit game sells a million copies, it might still be at a loss. In that case, it’s not sustainable as a business. Even a “light, simple, and compact” game can be well-crafted and enjoyable.”
Recently, we’ve seen a rise in small indie titles making a significant impact, such as PocketPair’s Palworld and Game Sciences’ Black Myth: Wukong.
There’s no inherent requirement for developers to focus solely on large-scale projects, but this hasn’t prevented corporations from investing hundreds of millions into games that consumers actively reject.
During that time, it appears no one paused to consider whether there was an audience interested in playing as such characters.
Video games are becoming increasingly costly for consumers, resulting in subscription services such as the XBOX Game Pass to flourish despite diverting funds away from smaller, non-live service titles.
For instance, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 6 is being hyped to an extreme degree, with Take-Two expressing concerns over potential “review bombing” and rumors suggesting that the game’s price might rise to $80 – $100, making it certain that the world’s most expensive video game will be a catastrophic failure on release.
The industry is struggling to sustain itself as development cycles drag on, and corporations seem more willing to face bankruptcy than be labeled sexist or racist for rejecting ESG initiatives.
Meanwhile, fun is hard to come by, as companies like Capcom keep altering and censoring classic games to appease BlackRock’s demands.
Instead of addressing the underlying issues, removing the subversive parasitic developers that have infiltrated almost every mainstream game company or distancing themselves from ESG and DEI tokenization, the temporary solution seems to be maintaining the status quo by scaling back ambitions and producing smaller-scale games, likely while still charging high prices.
It’s too late for the Western games industry to change direction now. As previously mentioned, developing a large-scale AAA title in today’s environment takes nearly five years. With consumers only now beginning to recognize BlackRock’s influence on their escapism.
Companies would need to take immediate action and find a way to survive long enough for their efforts to pay off, as more prominent slop focused solely on spreading queer-centric propaganda are announced and released, only to flop catastrophically in the market, much like the fate expected for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
The industry can’t afford to wait another three to five years for these companies to realize their mistakes and redeliver products that gamers actually want. Incompetence is rampant among global corporations like Microsoft, Sony, Square Enix, and Bandai Namco, who recently embraced DEI initiatives despite shutting down their DEI-focused live service MMORPG, Blue Archive.
These companies refuse to manage their bloated headcounts, development budgets or the fact that they are adhering to a failed ideology to avoid being labeled racist or sexist, resulting in nothing but costly failures.
In contrast, smaller studios that genuinely understand and cater to their target audiences are thriving. For instance, Qureate achieved success with the release of Bunny Garden. Indie studios like Qureate, Compile Heart, and Inti Creates are certain to remain in the industry long after the major players have left, and honestly, that’s good enough for me.
