I don’t play video games.
My parents agreed that game controllers and TVs wouldn’t be a part of their children’s lives well before I came into the world, and while I played the occasional word game on a smartphone, video games were off limits.
The thing with video games is that, if they don’t get you early, you’re unlikely to be hooked later in life. At some point, my parents were no longer mandating that I didn’t play video games, but if I chose to waste time (and I’ve certainly wasted my fair share of time), I didn’t do it shooting down bad guys in a gaming universe.
All of this is to say that I came across this news item on pure chance (thank you, Not the Bee).
On Aug. 23, Sony released a “5v5 first-person shooter” game (meaning Sony spent a lot of money on it) called Concord. It’s unclear exactly how much the company spent on it (although leaks suggest it was over $200 million), but what is clear is that it was a total flop. Within the first 24 hours, the game failed to break 700 players on PlayStation — or even 1,000 concurrent players online within the first couple of days.
To put that into perspective for those of my readers who, like me, don’t pay attention to these things, Forbes’ Paul Tassi writes, “I’ve seen many rough releases in my time, and I cannot think of anything that compares to what’s happening with Concord here…. It’s such a low figure I’m genuinely trying to figure out if something is technically wrong with the numbers here.”
A brief perusal of X reveals exactly what went wrong. It wasn’t the numbers.
You see, Sony apparently decided that the gaming community was ready for a game that just oozes diversity and inclusion. The characters are a hodgepodge of pink hair, green skin, and pronouns; players noticed and did not approve. Sony did catch on eventually. Within the first 24 hours, Sony removed Concord’s LGBTQ+ and political tag from the game’s Steam page. That didn’t help.
This isn’t the first time this has happened this year. When Warner Bros. released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, gamers criticized it as woke. That game was considered the year’s worst flop until Concord.
The moral of the story is abundantly clear: DEI is not a great way to sell a video game.
It turns out that when Americans head home from their corporate 9–5 job where they’re being forced to sit through DEI seminars and carefully tiptoe around HR departments, the last thing they want to do is pick through characters with an endless number of pronouns. They’ve had enough, and they are looking for an escape from all the craziness.
Evidently, that’s something that Hollywood and the gaming industry (which tend to be one and the same) haven’t yet figured out, despite the growing list of major feature films that have flopped due to woke messaging.