I mean yeah honestly a huge part of European national identities seems to be getting subsumed by philosophies that originated and primarily exist in the US.

I’d imagine that Trump serves as a wake up call in regards to that stuff, but at the end of the day I’m not French.

The only time I’ve heard of “bury your gays” was Voltron, which IMO was a good series that was murdered by a fandom that resented it for not being their personal self insert fan fiction.

Look man this “grown adult acting like a middle school bully” thing worked on reddit in 2019 because everyone was terminally online and you’d be backed up by twenty plus commenters hurling vitriol.

It’s 2025. There are maybe 15 people total interacting with this post. I have a life in a way that was impossible during the covid era.

Grow up.

Sure, but the vast majority of people realize what’s going on if an IP starts rambling on about freedom, Jesus, or the thin blue line. You can make comments about those things being transparent pandering and the overwhelming majority of people will just believe you.

Meanwhile up until recently that wasn’t really true with liberal pandering, and it still isn’t in a lot of spaces.

One thing to note is that I disagree with you on using Chick-fil-A as an example. They are true believers when it comes to this stuff, and half their claim to fame is being good to such an extent that liberals eat there anyway.

The difference between actual diversity revolves around tokenization, flanderization, homogenization, and of course gaslighting.

“culture war” minority characters are often inserted into narratives where they don’t quite fit, are often one dimensional characters, and often all act in a certain way based off their race/gender/sexuality combo, and are often inserted to gaslight anyone who has an issue with the low quality of the underlying product into thinking all criticism is bigoted.

It’s the last point that both you and Ubisoft are leveraging right now. If they replaced Yasuke with some burly Japanese dude, the entire discourse would be centered around how this game is a mid-at-best title for way too much money.

Instead asshole stans like you come out of the woodwork to push a narrative that most negative criticism centered around bigotry.

There are plenty of IPs with minority characters that don’t get shit on, because both the IP and the characters are actually good.

Enjoy your $70 mid-fest.

Okay so explain to me why things like Spiderverse and Baldur’s Gate receive nearly ubiquitous acclaim in ways Snow White and Assassins Creed doesn’t.

It’s a giant scam to get people to defend low effort mediocre content.

It worked for a while, because there was 100 percent a subset of people who just bought games because of social media hype. The combination of the changing media landscape and economic environment has resulted in this falling apart.

Look if you can’t tell the difference between actually well designed games with a diverse cast and Ubisoft crap number 12 then that’s on you.

I feel like a huge portion of corporate America has adopted the following strategy:

• Half ass a product despite a comically large budget, resulting in a product that ranges in quality from mediocre to downright terrible
• Stick some culture war shit somewhere in the product
• Expect reviewers to give you overwhelmingly positive reviews based off political virtue signaling
• Put a magnifying glass on the vocal minority of genuinely toxic fans, so that you can claim everyone who doesn’t like the mediocre product is toxic
• bullshit about sales numbers
• Obfuscate individual success/failures on earnings reports, and blame overall underperformance on “macroeconomic conditions”

Like at this point it’s on me for engaging with these posts I guess.

I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.

Well duh that’s what they Keyblade is for

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.

I get the feeling the part of capitalism Phil Spencer hates is the part where consumers can take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the product.

It’s interesting. If I were a teenager today I would read this and think Microsoft ruined what would have been an amazing game by corporate greed.

I was a teenager when Fable III came out though, so I know better.

First game reviews from that era are completely whack. You had a ton of big name game blogs that were basically giving everything a 9/10 if it was from the right publisher. The smaller blogs weren’t really in the internet zeitgeist until Fable III, so you could compare their scores of Fable I and II for reference.

That being said, there was a lot of discussion about how Fable II was a bit of a disappointment. People felt that the system was a lot shallower than promised, and the game itself felt extremely on rails at times. None of the endings really change the world, which wouldn’t be that insulting if two of them didn’t involve your dog dying. I think saying that Fable II was amazingly well received is kinda bs.

I can say for sure that putting the blame on Microsoft for Fable III over promising and under delivering is absolute horeshit. The guy behind Fable, Molyneux, was famous for pulling that crap. This was an era where basically virtually every single game trailer could have been an FTC violation of anyone was paying attention, and Molyneux somehow stood out beyond anyone else for how full of shit he was. At one point he implied that he developed AGI and implemented it in a video game.

While Boomers got a lot of things wrong, as I get older I sort of understand where they are coming from. This article paints a narrative so incorrect it’s almost fictional, and it’s being propagated because most people interacting are too young to remember but somehow extremely self assured.

So I agree with OP on the style of the press release being infuriating.

It seems like a lot of tech releases these days are written for non technical journalists (ie The Verge), “tech influencers”, and cargo cultists. They always read in a way that’s super overhyped to the point where you almost want to be dismissive of the end product as a form of protests.

However the tech seems cool. Between VSCode and GitHub we’ll be seeing a lot of feedback sooner or later.

Investors generally want to get a positive ROI. They don’t want to tank the company to the point where it can be acquired by another company for pennies on the dollar.

Look at Nokia. When they hired a former Microsoft exec, they weren’t expecting him to tank the entire company so it could be acquired by Microsoft.

Kotlin was made by Jetbrains and later adopted by Google.

Honestly if you read the actual email I think there could be significant legal trouble ahead.

Spencer talks about how the main barrier to acquiring Nintendo is that they sit on a mountain of cash. He calls that unfortunate. He then proceeded to state a company with connections to Microsoft had just bought a lot of Nintendo shares, and how they could work with said company to make such an acquisition a reality.

The company in question publicly bought a massive amount of Nintendo shares. They then proceeded to pressure Nintendo to invest more capital instead of sitting on the cash pile they have now. They did this under claims that such a move would be beneficial to Nintendo in terms of ROI. However, it would also result in Nintendo being more vulnerable to an acquisition from Microsoft if any of those bets don’t pay off.

In short, it could be argued that Microsoft worked with investors to tank Nintendo so they could buy it. That’s a huge deal and will probably result in a shitstorm.