Marketing has been rough lately. I stopped using reviews sites for the most part. A lot of the time I could not tell if there was any integrity in the reviews posted or if it was just a paid Ad. I rely a lot more on word of mouth and watching my favorite streamers play a game before even considering it. I get the devs struggle. How do you grab my attention when the market is full of these types of games and it’s hard to differentiate at a glance.

Also, this game from the article is the type of game I wait until a steam sale before buying.

Thank you. I mainly wanted to know what the talking points are so I can have effective conversations with the people around. This one semi popped out of nowhere for me and I felt I missed something.

Agreed, the term “feminist propaganda” alone here is enough to make me question the studio/publisher leadership group.

@Chee_Koala, I’ve read your other comment on this post and I agree with you. Going to pass on the game. It’s the reality of today. If we want things to improve we have to vote with our democratic right to vote if we have it or we vote with our money. This type of topic pops up a lot in media, big tech and most other large companies that somewhat dominate an industry. There are enough options out there where we can’t always make the perfect moral decision, but we can at least try to choose on the lesser of many evils in our shopping and media consumption based on the information we have.

Out of curiosity, since I’m out of the loop, what is the misogynistic discourse around the game or studio? Is it based on themes of the books/mythology the game is based on? Or is it some other thing the devs went too far with eastern culture wise?

Was my favorite game for 2 years. Got into the esports and everything. Got super pumped at Blizcon 2018 when they said they are doubling down on the game and investing more into it. Bought a $100 year pass thing to help support the game.

Two weeks after Blizcon announcement thing, esports is canceled and most devs pulled from the game. I don’t think I ever felt that betrayed (I know that’s weird). I uninstalled the Blizzard client a few days later and left the Blizzard fandom.

Riot games is going down the same route “it feels” right now with League of Legends. I don’t think these companies understand that these games are not just games. They are these weird intersection of common interests for a friend group. Destroying that also destroys any interest in their IPs.

Do they really need to launder anything (genuine question as I could be missing something)? Usually you do that to hide money from the government, but in this case it’s MBS and co using money from oil and other shady stuff to try to propel themselves as relevant in the world. Would not put it past them to also use this as a way to fund more terrorist activity (it’s Saudi Arabia after all)

The saddest part of all this is how they could have used some of all their crazy clickbaity mega spending to help Gaza. Instead they would rather pay a bunch of sports and esports athletes crazy sums to increase epeen

It’s almost odd how rare this attitude is nowadays. I remember being excited for the next Blizzard Games release back in the day because you always heard them talk about quality over meeting arbitrary deadlines.

I get that being out there in the market early is important too. Investments need to pay a return with our current economic model. I just keep thinking of all the games that could have used a little more ripening and they likely would have been a lot more successful instead of losing the studio money.