If even the Marxist New York Times is contemplating the end of DEI even in Hollywood, then the era of DEI must really be coming to an end.

Is the Awkward 'Diversity Era' of Hollywood Behind Us?

The past decade's clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.

Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of "Black Panther"? Do you remember when an all-female version of "Ghostbusters" was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a "Star Wars" film described the Empire as a "white supremacist (human) organization" after Donald Trump's 2016 election? Has enough time now passed to say that was all a bit strange?

Looking back, you can see a period when identitarian politics were in cultural ascendancy; you can spot the moments when our media overlords -- on their back feet over rage at the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the paucity of nonwhite nominees at the Oscars, the aftermath of George Floyd's death -- vowed to change their ways and atone for their past. But what was particular to the Hollywood of the 2010s was the way these politics fused with the industry's insatiable demand for sequels, spinoffs and reboots, giving us a curious and mercenary new invention: the inclusive multimillion-dollar blockbuster. (The BIPOCbuster, if you will.) It's the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.

Or at least it was. The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed. Many of the films it produced seemed to imagine themselves as barrier-breaking productions, landmarks like "In the Heat of the Night." In reality, they have come to feel more like a niche genre of their own, the way spaghetti westerns or blaxploitation films do -- unique products of a particular cultural moment that now require context and explanation to understand. They remind me, more than anything, of 1980s action flicks, a genre whose tropes and ideologies feel almost comically redolent of a specific era, whether the films are good or so-bad-they're-good. This was the decade of Sylvester Stallone's going back to Vietnam to try to win the war for Reagan's America in "Rambo: First Blood Part II," the decade of flat-topped martial-arts commandos, good cops who don't play by the rules, gunshots that make cars explode, brawny henchmen machine-gunned by the dozens. But by the time we reached the 1993 meta-action-comedy "Last Action Hero" -- an irony-laden genre sendup in which a boy magically gets to become the sidekick to a fictional hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger -- you could hear the death knell of the kinds of films Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme had been making for years.

Is that what watching "Barbie" might feel like in 10 years -- once, perhaps, "the patriarchy" feels like a clearly of-the-moment choice for a Big Bad? The tropes of this passing era are as familiar and easily spotted as with older periods. There is, for one thing, the showy, self-satisfied gender-swapping, as with that 2016 election-year reboot of "Ghostbusters." That movie prompted enough openly misogynistic and racist backlash to make it look as if it must be a noble endeavor -- as if any Hollywood executives who got reactionaries frothing at the mouth must be accomplishing something important, even if all they did was tweak the balance of characters in a dusty franchise.

Then there are the paper-thin "diverse" characters parachuted into major films -- put front and center on every poster but given curiously little to do as the plot unfolds. Brie Larson's Captain Marvel was set up as the most powerful superhero in the Marvel universe but ended up playing no decisive role in its most important films. (She was later joined by a Black woman and a Muslim woman in the sequel "The Marvels," another in a series of firsts, but still a throwaway film.) Many attempts to diversify old intellectual property only emphasized how awkward and unwelcoming those worlds were to the kinds of people they wanted to include: The characters could do nothing to change the old logic of the stories they were dropped into.

I've wanted to discuss Dragon Age: The Veilguard for a while, but the election kept getting in the way. It's a good example of the Wages of DEI.

Dragon Age is -- or rather, was -- a long-running, much-liked, and highly profitable video game franchise. The newest release, The Veilguard, was anticipated to be a huge guaranteed hit.

Then... Wokeness Intensified.

The game showed off its new "inclusiveness" features. In the game, you could make your character trans. Transgender in a psuedo-Medieval fantasy game.

Not only could you make your character trans, but you could give her double masectomy scars as proof of her gender transition:

Although the game claimed that they added this feature to make everyone feel "included" -- and they included Vitiligo and cellulite as cosmetic enhancements you could give your character to make it Just Like You (TM) so you can Feel Seen (TM) -- they also wanted to defeat the Male Gaze so they do not allow you to give your character breasts bigger than a B-cup.

Below, the character customization screen shows various "sliders" allowing you to change different aspects of the character's appearance from minimum to maximum. The "chest size" slider is set to absolute maximum, and look at the bountiful bosom that produces:

So Dragon Age wants to to Feel Seen (TM) if you've lopped off your breasts, but not if you're a C or D cup.

One of your companion characters is trans, because of course it is. If you don't choose to make your own character trans, they're going to force you to deal with a character who won't stop talking about being trans.

Below, the game lectures you on not "misgendering" this character. It's not just a warning about misgendering, it's an instructional video about not putting the burden of a Misgendering Error on the Misgendering Victim itself, but in taking it upon yourself to punish yourself on their behalf for the crime.

This was a game created not to please an audience, but to win industry awards from a woke industry.

It certainly didn't please the audience: Sales are terrible, despite this being a long-established series.

Grummz
@Grummz

We're winning. DAV has fallen.

Dragon Age Veilguard has failed to recover it's costs. It has failed and no, holiday sales won't save it.

Bioware is so angry that Dragon Age Veilguard sales numbers have leaked, that they are launching an internal investigation to find the leakers.

Here's what we know from @EndymionYT, @SmashJT, @RealHypnotic1 and others:

• Concurrent players have dropped off the charts just 2 weeks in, sitting at a peak of 34,068 vs their launch weekend high of 89,418. A 62% drop before the month even closes.

• Returns are rumored to be 30,000 copies, and the game is being traded in at Gamestop so fast that used copies of the game are flooded and being discounted with a trade-in value of only $14 cash. By comparison, Stellar Blade, a much smaller IP and many months older than DAV is $16.10 cash, which shows you just how bad DAV's value has dropped. Fun fact: Star Wars Outlaws is even worse, at just $11.90 cash. Stellar Blade wins again.

• Total sales for DAV have only JUST crested 1 million copies in 2 weeks. Budget is rumored to be at 250-300M for the game, making it fall well short of breaking even. If you take most games sales profit at around 70-80% of list price (after store markups and digital platform fees), a 300M budget would need around 6-7 million copies sold. (this is where I differ from most other's estimates who say 4-5M).

  Dragon Age Veilguard has failed. They will see a tiny surge in sales in Holidays but not much. Total copies will barely reach 2M by next year (unless they start just giving it away - expect heavy discounts and bundles to make this number seem bigger than it is).

  Gamers have rejected the heavy handed woke, preachy politics for one, and DA fans have rejected the new graphics and action oriented gameplay, which feel very alien to the franchise. You can do diversity right, without preachy HR lectures disguised as a story, and you can do it very very wrong, like DAV.

  We're winning.

  Everybody fights, everybody builds, nobody quits!

  Sources: Gamestop website, Steam DB, insider leak videos from Smash and Endymion and Hypnotic retail data and my own industry experience publishing, operating and developing AAA games.

The game even failed to win the industry awards it was built to accumulate like so many experience points.

At the last Game Awards, the game received a single nomination -- just one.

And this one wasn't for game play or design or writing or art direction or anything that has actual value for the customer.

The one award nomination it got was for... "accessibility."

Grummz says the snubbing was an attempt by the industry to warn woke game designers: stop doing this. It's killing the business and we're not going to just give you the Woke Awards you're craving. We can't afford to encourage this any longer.

Grummz
@Grummz

I think everyone was surprised that Dragon Age Veilguard did not get any nominations except for "accessibility."

It seems that even the corporate guard, represented by @TheGameAwards
is learning that gamers won't put up with this kind of thing anymore.

Just as the Oscars dumped politics and wokism after the election, the Game Awards seems to be following a similar trend.

All of the (dying) woke games "journalism" magazines of course gave this stinky dud huge praise:

Grummz
@Grummz

Dragon Age DUMPED by The Game Awards in contrast to Game Journalist RAVINGS of PRAISE about the game.

Game Journalists lied to you again. So many outlets touted Dragon Age Veilguard @dragonage as 9/10 and a "return to form" for @Bioware
.

@eurogamer : 10/10
@GameRant : 10/10
@IGN: 9/10
@GamesRadar : 9/10
@screenrant : 9/10
@Forbes (@paultassi): 8.5/10

Jason Schreier @jasonschreier
posted "Go woke, go bro---err, top the charts" before deleting it after the failure was clear, claiming it was to "see Chuds get dunked on."

We now know sales were so bad that Bioware is in panic, and EA has yet to reveal any sales announcement since the game launched.

Why did Jason delete his post? He has inside access to the sales figures for sure. What did he know.

And what did The Game Awards know that made them scrub Dragon Age Veilguard from their award nominations?

This might be the end of the DAV team within Bioware, who will likely be folded into the Mass Effect team.

If Bioware even survives that long.

But those great reviews didn't even last. Once the games "journalism" magazines saw that the public hated this game and that their 9/10 ratings were destroying their own credibility, they began walking these ratings back and assigning new reviewers to re-review the game, giving it lower ratings.

This is how Real Journalism works!