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Polygon "exposes" toxicity among male gamers

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
Honestly, I am thinking of selling my pro and and be done with gaming and just stick to building cars. The current trend of western developers shoving their ideological agendas down our throats or forcing political beliefs in their games has just crossed the line.

Just taking a glimpse at some of western devs twitter just reinforces this. Its not only naughty dog but majority of sony developers that all gather in some cringy sjw circle jerk about gay pride, female rights and rainbow colored dicks, and how their political beliefs should shoved down our throats, and to no surprise they act in a hostile manner when you have a different opinion.

Gaming over a decade ago was never about this. Every damn game released now has to have some sjw bullshit shoe-horned in.

I couldn't give a fuck if someone decides to take it up the ass, and I am all for equality but there is a time and place for that shit. Western devs should take some estrogen blockers and shut the fuck up already.

Honestly, I believe this will blow over with time. Once developers learn that people are not interested in this idiotic identity politics and that people will buy good games, regardless of the "controversial" stuff contained within, they will ignore the minority that clamours for its removal. Plus there are still tons of wonderful games that are being made by developers who don't give two shits about politics or what a bunch of whiny millennials/uptight puritans want. Especially when those are not the people who were going to buy the game in the first place.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Honestly, I believe this will blow over with time. Once developers learn that people are not interested in this idiotic identity politics and that people will buy good games, regardless of the "controversial" stuff contained within, they will ignore the minority that clamours for its removal. Plus there are still tons of wonderful games that are being made by developers who don't give two shits about politics or what a bunch of whiny millennials/uptight puritans want. Especially when those are not the people who were going to buy the game in the first place.

This is the key thing these developers/publishers need to not be so oblivious to.
 

Mecha Meow

Member
Honestly, I believe this will blow over with time. Once developers learn that people are not interested in this idiotic identity politics and that people will buy good games, regardless of the "controversial" stuff contained within, they will ignore the minority that clamours for its removal. Plus there are still tons of wonderful games that are being made by developers who don't give two shits about politics or what a bunch of whiny millennials/uptight puritans want. Especially when those are not the people who were going to buy the game in the first place.

Yup and it keeps being proven true in gaming, comics, and movies. This will definitely blow over at some point.

Building cars is cool too though.

whynotboth.gif
 

eot

Banned
It's always been shit. Pick up any EGM from the 90s. It'll come off like it was written by some easily impressionable child that totally bought all the marketing bullshit. People just need to understand that the video game "press" has never been anything besides thinly veiled marketing. That's all it is.

If anyone actually got critical, started asking hard questions, and didn't give the "right" games a free pass, they'd get blacklisted. Anyone remember the minor controversy behind Brandon Sheffield's Rage interview? All the guy did was not buy their marketing bullshit and actually questioned the developers. Was blacklisted, employer was basically sent a threatening e-mail. And gamers still bought Bethesda games after this.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/37939/Opinion_Journalistic_Rage.php

They're all the same, though, and if you think this isn't happening on a wide scale, I've got a bridge to sell you. There are games that are too big to fail, and there are conversations happening that basically amount to, "if you don't give this game a 90+, you're not getting invited to the locker room after the game anymore," and these pussy media outlets let them get away with it every single time because they just want to sell ads and couldn't give less of a shit about quality video games.

All you really have to do is look at games that have a huge variance between the critic and user rating, and you know something's up. These are sacred cows that you can't call out on their bullshit because there's too much riding on their success.

Uncharted 4, for example, was a piece of fucking crap. Thing basically played like Dragon's Lair. 93 my ass. Game critics talking about how wonderful it's "gameplay" was. There's a reason that there's a 10 point difference between the critic and user score even after all the Playstation fanboys propped the game up.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end

Another funny example is Dark Souls. So Dark Souls was just a normal good game that hadn't achieved sacred cow status yet. There wasn't a lot of publisher pressure and people could generally be honest about it.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dark-souls

Game is a watershed, seminal, huge hit. Dark Souls 2 rolls around. The franchise is too big to fail now. Bandai decides to pay attention to it, put a lot of money into marketing, start pressuring the media outlets to make sure it's a success. Game's a piece of shit, yet look at the critic reviews. The fucking douches rated Dark Souls 2 more highly than 1. Of course the user scores are actually realistic.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dark-souls-ii

What's going on is comically transparent. I don't understand why anyone even visits commercial gaming news/review sites anymore when you can just watch gameplay video on Youtube and Twitch and know whether a game is good in 5 seconds.
Publishers pressuring reviewers is definitely a thing that's happened, but I don't think that's what's actually causing those reviews. People get swept up in the hype, and it affects how they see things. I can imagine reviewers being more susceptible to that kind of influence, because they're writing their reviews blindly, but many surely have a desire to give the 'right' opinion. I think they feel way more pressure from the audience to give prominent games good scores than they do from the publishers. My go to example is GTA IV, which scored a ridiculous 98 on metacritic. Another one is Binary Domain, which has (I think) 66 for the PC version, because no one could imagine a Japanese TPS being good or something, it certainly wasn't judged on its own merits.
 
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