Bad DEI practice is where you hire people based on their skin color and political view just to fill up a quota. Good DEI practice is where you hire based on merit, regardless of their skin color and political view. It's good that it gives the same opportunity to everyone. DEI is not a solution for workplace harassment because both woke or anti-woke people are capable of doing harassment.
DEI is a solution for workplace harassment because it ensure there's a vehicle victims can use to report the abuse and get it addressed. Otherwise you end up with Ubisoft situations where people are being abused and have no recourse.
Funny ol' world. All the companies I've worked for have had equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policies etc. The only observation I'd like to make is that a company can have policies on paper yet people may behave quite differently in practice.
You are absolutely correct. We received the results of a survey here at my department from HR just today. Despite our "policy" being diversity and equality, the survey said "Overwhelmingly, the non-management workforce thinks that management denies merit raises, promotions and other recognition to their employees due to favoritism, bias and nepotism." Oh yeah, they do talk a big game, but the reality is, they still only give raises and promotions to the good old boy club. You could look at our hiring policy and believe it to be the very epitome of "woke DEI" and yet that isn't what is really happening at all. Up top, it's still the same old rot.
@@julilla1 Sounds about right. Human nature, I guess. Jobs for the boys and all that. I like the George Carlin quote: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it." I used to notice boyfriends/girlfriends of supervisors being promoted discreetly to similar positions, when their competence was questionable. Ain't it a hoot.
One thing I've noticed consistently in the places that I've worked is that when it comes to small insular groups, say 20 people or less, they tend to look like the hiring manager for that group. Essentially anyone who looks similar to the manager is benefiting from a positive bias, given a 'free pass' of sorts which fast-tracks the hiring process for them.
This content makes me happy to subscribe to you. More people gotta make an effort to push back against the ridiculous toxic culture war nonsense that only serves to misdirect people away from scummy corporate monetization schemes that have been ruining gaming for the last two decades
That's a pretty awful thing to say. Why does the creator's skin color matter? He made a great game. I don't care if he's secretly an alien from the Gamma Quandrant; as long as he's not doing anything horrible, then all that matters is, he made a great TTRPG. Everything else is ephemeral.
@@SamBrockmann I have to remember that sarcasm is not easily expressed on the internet. As a black guy who is into game dev he is one of my heroes. I guess that was not clear.
@@SlanderedGaming Yup! Also he is voices Maximum Mike a DJ in the game. It was his character from the TTRPG who often broke the fourth wall to speak directly to the player
@@briaw40 I don't know those other people, but yeah I don't care much for Asmondgold. He talks big about how bad these companies are, but he still supports them by streaming their games to hundreds of thousands of people. It's all empty talk
the diversity of thought point is, i think, a really good one. i cant count the number of times ive seen a piece of media or an ad campaign embroiled in some scandal where my first thought is that, evidently, they didnt have enough perspectives looking at the product before it was released, because those perspectives could have easily solved the problem. people have a lot of different backgrounds, so if you want to make a piece of art that appeals to a lot of people, that millions can enjoy and connect to, you need lots of perspectives.
Unfortunately we seem to live in the nightmare of postmodernism where when you repeat things over and over enough, they become true to a large number of people. It's always nice to hear some facts!
It’s almost painful to read some of the comments in this comment section. It seems like several commenters didn’t even watch the video. 😂 But this was a great video. I appreciate your explanation of DEI and its uses from the perspective of someone with experience in corporate America. I think you’re spot on with Ubisoft having a major problem from its infamous sexual harassment scandal a few years ago, which is incredibly damaging to a company both in the hiring space and the consumer space. I’ll be using your points to think about major events in the gaming industry in the future.
Great video, Slandered. It's really nice hearing about these situations from a different, informed perspective. I think it's easy for people to see things like Dustborn and the whole Sweet Baby situation crash and burn and see that failure as an inevitability with all things related to DEI, and honestly, I wasn't sure on my thoughts before this video. Thanks for your personal insight here.
When Cyberpunk released CDPR stock was at $31.00 a share (Dec 2020), but by the time the fallout of the botched cyberpunk launch and the years of fallout they dropped down to a low of $4.19 a share (Sep 2022). This is devastating. Much more recently In the last year CDPR stock went from $5.99 a share up to $10.15 a share. It's objectively almost doubled in value with whatever they are doing differently now. Probably Witcher 4 updates, a pretty good cyberpunk expansion, etc led to this, IMO.
The worst part is these culture war tourists used to complain that “woke” people don’t know know games or the histories of the franchises they were working on. Looks like the anti-sjws were always projecting.
Why would a Ubisoft insider know anything about the inner workings of CDPR? Like you I have worked in the corporate world for many years and in my view, if you have a good DEI policy you are not hiring underqualified people, you are hiring people who are often OVERLOOKED. People that do not look like the standard corporate mould often have to work harder than people that do, so as long as this is not the SOLE reason to hire someone, having a diverse range of viewpoints can be very beneficial.
Thank you so much for talking about this! I didn't expect this channel of all things to be weighing in on this whole culture war nightmare but I'm impressed with how thorough you were
It’s funny how industry jargon can take over your brain. Every time I see someone getting super bent out of shape over DEI, I have a moment of confusion at why everyone’s all up in arms about Dose Equivalent Iodine before I remember that I’m not at work. Then I remember that people getting bent out of shape about DEI practices makes about as much sense as if people were having strong reactions to the concept of using I-131 as a measuring stick for how dangerous an area is
Huh... Spellandshield, that's the best example of the pot calling the kettle black. I migrated from your channel to this one specifically BECAUSE your political opinions and pessimistic attitude were tainting otherwise interesting videos.
@@charliebee5154 What political opinions? I have NEVER talked about politics there. You are conflating politics with pessimism. If you don't like my pessimism, say so but that is NOT political.
Their internal HR problems notwithstanding, Ubisoft is going belly up because for the past decade they've mostly been delivering uninspired, bloated games with priority-one cash shops designed to keep people spending on boosts, cosmetics, and other ephemera. Their open-world formula is stale and people who prioritize game quality and may not even be aware of the culture wars stuff are starting to punish them for it. I played AC Valhalla a year or so ago and remember watching a video after getting bored of it whose title perfectly encapsulates modern Ubi's problem - they make games for no one. AC Valhalla has all this stuff - stealth, melee & ranged combat, exploration, diverse missions, a cinematic story, a progression system... And yet, none of these systems are particularly deep or engaging. There's certainly a 100-hour game to be had there, but it just gets boring after a while no matter what your playstyle is.
I agree their games are bloated and sometimes uninspired but I feel the same way about CoD, Madden and some other franchises. I don't think game design tells the full story about their fall.
Long time watcher, first time poster. This was an absolutely terrible decision. Look at the people in the comment section calling each other the worst things possible. Politics in gaming never ends well. It brings out the absolute worst in people. I hope this isn't a new approach to the channel and you get back to games and avoid politics.
I think the point about merit and DEI being compatible was well made in this video. Having work experience rather than degrees; being able to work well with people of all walks of life; having a complementary rather than replicative background and approach to problem solving etc. can all be considered MERIT. But unless you actually consider diversity to be something positive, you might not realize that these things are merits. Not merits to be considered to the exclusion of all else, but merits nonetheless. Having been at a great many companies as a consultant for more than a decade, it was clear to me pretty quickly that the more heterogeneous a company was in the make up of its people, the more well adjusted it was. The more homogenous, the more likely that there would be problems that they themselves were blind to, because every person was basically the same person, with the same approach, and the same skills. If you go for merit, and truly consider ALL relevant variables, the end result will NOT be copy-pasting the same person over and over again. That would assume a very constrained definition of what merit is. Anecdotal, but this has been my experience.
This was a great, nuanced take, which unfortunately means it will not see nearly as much as exposure as Enymion's hot take, I hate that about the algorithm, but it is what it is. I also have decades of corporate experience, and agree with much of what you said. I will say, though, that there is one practice that has been dominating entertainment lately that I do not like, which is mandated inclusivity in writing and casting. It feels forced and fake, which kills immersion for me. I want to see diverse creators given free rein to craft the characters of the story they want to tell. If that means the cast is all black, or all white, or all whatever, that's fine so long as it fits the story they want to tell. I don't like the idea of writers being presented with a checklist saying each game or show must have 2 of this, 3 of that, etc. We do not need to make everything look like the population of Los Angeles.
Company makes game. Check reviews. If game looks good and suits your tastes, buy it. If it looks bad or not your style, don't buy it. Unless you're a shareholder, your interest in the company is 100% contrived. I know it's easy and fun to get emotionally invested in the company, but considering how much is "he said / she said", it's just throwing your energy out the window. I mean if it's that interesting to you, by all means. My career in data has a lot of ties to equitable business practices, and yeah no thanks. This stuff is complex and not worth your time and energy unless you know you're working with reliable data. Likely outcome is you get angry over something you personally have no control over. If you decide to get into legislation or corporate leadership, sure yeah this is interesting to follow. To most of us out here, I suggest we try to avoid letting our emotions get caught up in a tornado of questionable information.
To be clear, the intent of my comment here is simply to remind people that they might risk spinning their wheels over a muddy perspective of the outsider. If you find yourself upset, rest assured you're opting in and running on a fraction of the story. Content creators make money on views. Being vocal. Outrage sells. You are the profit for them. If you are outraged, it's usually by design. Controversy gets views. (Except Slandered, he cool)
If you hire based on anything other than merit, you will get anything other than merit. Nobody wants to work with people who aren't qualified, feel entitled to "contribute" bad ideas, and cry racism when rebuked. It's a never ending cycle that has seen the destruction of the games industry over the last 14 or so years. Good devs will leave/retire and there will be no one left in the industry capable of creating the quality we had a decade ago -- it's pretty much happened already.
yes a fictional employee that contributes bad ideas and cries racism when rebuked is a problem, and totally not that all major games are released by soulless corporations that view games not as a revenue stream, but as capital whose sole purpose is to increase the value for shareholders through stock buy backs. Yes its that pesky pink haired strawman I constructed in my brain that is the real issue here, the system is fine. Anything so I don't have to critically think about anything and educate myself or - god forbid! - gain some material understanding of the world. Easier to just lash into whatever randos on the internet tell me the real issue is, while I turn the blind eye to sociopathic billionaires destroying the hobby I love just so their magic line can go up.
@@KingslayerSrb those soulless corporations you mention who do embrace ESG and DEI, you think they do it from the goodness of their heart? Or maybe those pictures of 'pesky pink haired strawman' they present on official websites are fake?
If you hire based solely on a person's resume then you end up with a Ubisoft situation where "qualified" leaders harassed and abused women on their team for years. Merit must take into account a person's skills and their capability to lead/work with those who are completely different. In no way, shape, form, or fashion is this rocket science.
Let me share my perspective. I'm not going to attack anybody during this tirade. I'm simply trying to put my personal opinion out there. First let's talk about DEI/ESG. When it comes to DEI/ESG there are couple issues but the most important one right now is that both sides of conflict are wagging their fingers at their opponents. Nobody likes being called bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe and whatnot and calling people names was one of the first tactics to be employed. Why? How does it help anyone? It only makes the other side defend their turf even more. What's worse pushing the topic relentlessly has trained the public to see patterns. Mankind as a whole survived based on pattern recognition, from spotting snakes (we still have evolutionary fear of them) to intuitively understanding that some sounds/articulations mean danger. Pattern recognition is mankind's strength and weakness at the same time and it is this way because we had to be able to make snap judgements. Do I agree with any of the side? I have more in common with DEI rejecting side but then again I come from a corporate background with a very poorly implemented DEI initiative to the point that it is used as a club to hit employees on their heads. Either way the problem is that there is no discussion, there is a trench warfare. Now when it comest to CDPR and their statements... I'm from Poland and until year 2020 I could very happily call myself fan of CDPR. I bought CP2077 in preorder on GOG. Man, I was burnt heavily by that game. I don't appreciate board members lying about the state of the game and saying that the game is running surprisingly well on consoles of older generation even though I'm a PC player. I don't appreciate the way the company mistreated the employees and mishandled the title. Yes, it was terribly mishandled when it comes to implementation. Imagine that middle/upper management wanted something implemented one week to abandon the idea next week and doing so multiple times throughout the production. This is time and resource mismanagement problem of enormous scale. It also caused crunch again because thanks to the mentioned board member the investors were pushing for the release. I still don understand why the hell the game was strongly advertised as such where your past (street kid, corpo, nomad) will have enormous meaning and will heavily influence the story. Spoiler alert - it's not doing that at all. This might have been one of these ideas put back and forth. When it comse to the scandalous launch the whole shtick was so bad for me that even now when CDPR announces anything new relating to CP2077 I tend to ask them whether it is running "surprisingly well" or if I will have to change in my setup. For example I did so with Edgerunners Netflix series where I asked if it's running surprisingly well on older tv or if I will be forced to buy a new one. I do this for one simple reason - to make them remember that any and I mean any fuckup like that will be remembered for a very long time. I want to believe in CDPR's mission statement but it will be a very long time before I will be able to trust them again. I'm not saying I won't buy their next title, I'm saying there won't be preorder from me. That is all of this long and unnecessary tirade of mine.
Yup that's why I was very careful not to disparage Endymion. I've seen people call him a bigot and all sorts of other things but I don't think that actually helps the conversation. It just automatically jades one side. So instead let's just deal with the content of what's being said.
I'm glad you made this video because it proved I was wrong about you, for that I am sorry. Endymion went from saying pretty suspect things to dropping the facade and showed me who he really is. From my understanding, DEI came about to try and stop companies from passing over a more qualified person for someone else because they don't fit a certain demographic.
Excellent! Some people are too young to remember when NOT being hired because you weren't white or male was the norm, and seem to be demanding more sexism and racism/
As a woman applying for jobs, I remember being grilled about whether I was considering a pregnancy in the short or long term future. Like I was literally supposed to try to convince them I'd never have children because it might inconvenience the workplace if I went on maternity leave. Wild shit.
when Asmond is mentioned- you should add a CGI Roach running across your Cap Shield eachtime. LOL for every mention- Asmond sends a friend from Joes Apartment
I really hate these political hate youtube channels that just stir the pot for views. I won't click on those channels, but I will support this channel.
@@SlanderedGaming it's all good. On a side note, while watching this video I thought back on the progress of your channel, being one of the OG viewers, before the channel name change! Glad you are still at it, after all the ups and downs of your personal life.
I really dislike these types of discussions videos due to how politicize it inevitable becomes and the comments certainly confirms that feeling. Really hope that this isn’t a indicator for future videos since the reasons why I like it was the non political gaming coverage.
I will be blunt; I am not political at all. When people start talking politics, my ears just tune out; I don't vote and I don't care. I fucking HATE politics of any sort, right, left, whatever but what I hate even more than politics is taking said real world politics and shoving them into games. Games have their own universes and worlds with their own histories and cultures and game makers can and have explored all sorts of divisive issues WITHIN the context of those games...rather than bringing in toxic (yes, using the actual meaning of the word) real world politics that just make people hate each other more than they already do. I have had up to my ears with the so-called culture war and both sides, left AND right. I wish they would just piss off and duke it out elsewhere and I don't know if it is DEI or not but I do know that games have become less daring than they used to be and they take fewer chances AND it is hard to miss, the character designs are just getting uglier and uglier and it is impossible to ignore. I guarantee you that no woman will look remotely as attractive as Triss or Yennifer in the next Witcher game and all of this IRL politics in games makes it impossible to tell interesting and difficult stories. For example, people love the story of the Krogan and the genophage...well you could NEVER tell that story in the current year because of the implications of the Krogan being this brutal, bellicose race that blew their planet up and threatened the galaxy...because someone would claim you could offend someone in the real world with that story arc. Politics in games destroys art, which is what games are, because it limits the stories you can tell to the party line you are supposed to toe. I would say the same thing if it were extreme right wing politics in games. All politics in games does is create strife, division and hatred AND worst of all it usually leads to bad games. Owlcat is my favourite studio; you know why? They just try to make good games and focus on the setting. I am currently playing Rogue Trader after your video and even though I will never be a WH40K fan I see how much love and attention Owlcat put into the game and why the 40K fans love it so much. It is exceptionally well done. If more studios just focused on making good games so much of this endless and tiresome culture war crap would die down…I just want studios to focus on making games and leave the politics out of it; everyone would benefit, even the people pushing the politics.
This. Even if it's DEI. Why is it more necessary today? Especially when there are still people white as snow, black as charcoal l, and yellow as sulfur that have been working on games.
It's interesting to hear you talk about a modern unwillingness to tackle difficult subjects in modern gaming. That's been a huge focus of the Dragon Age series and I am REALLY curious to find out if Veilguard is going to go soft. It's definitely something I will cover in my review.
Having just finished a demon run in Wrath, I gotta agree about Owlcat. There's so much dark moments and things your character can do on an evil path and many horrifying things you can see on the good paths. And it all fits withing that games universe, and they clearly didn't let modern day stuff scare them away from showing it.
Makes me laugh when people say they aren't political and then proceed to share an opinion. You might not want to fuck with politics but politics will fuck with you.... The uglier character designs argument is just fucking weird, what even makes you think that?
Sadly, I think the people who are the most vocal / outspoken about DEI (or any "hot topic") are usually the ones who know the least about them. I feel like Endymion falls into this grouping.
I think people have a right to be concerned about this because any time you introduce things like DEI, you are introducing bureaucracy, where decisions are made by a select few, maybe outsiders, who don't necessarily understand the audience they are selling to. This also adds bloat to the budgets which the consumer ends up paying for. That said, if the product is good and affordable, it doesn't matter.
Everything you just mentioned is absolutely a concern but the only people who can regulate it are in the company. We have no way of knowing what's really happening.
It seems to me that if dei works well, then the game could benefit greatly from it. But if handled poorly, then the game could suffer horribly from it.
Setting aside the underlying argument, it seems really clear to me that the CDPR Co-CEO should not have posted a reply to that youtuber. At some level they do need to reply when they are getting mischaracterized, but responding directly to a critic seems like a universally bad decision.
I would argue there is something to be said about the DEI argument and that it has affected some companies more than others. Mostly Ubisoft and companies like Deep Silver basically made that the center of some of their recent games like the next Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 6, and the Saint's Row reboot. These particular products were designed to be as least offensive and inclusive as possible and it has backfired for those companies. However the biggest problem this generation has had; at least for PC gaming is technical performance. There is a technical and skill deficit that appears to be related to having enough people who know how to work with DX12 and Vulcan and consumers have suffered from this as the industry builds this foundational knowledge. I hope by the time the next Witcher or Cyberpunk comes out they have this API problem solved and we start to see the performance gains this generation of hardware is supposed to be bringing.
There are absolutely some gaming companies who have implemented DEI policies poorly. That doesn't mean DEI in and of itself is evil. It means developer need to do a better job.
I appreciate your insight about this topic and ripping the bandaid off. It’s frustrating to see practically everything get slapped with the “woke/DEI/SBI!” drama tag. What’s next? Oxygen is woke?
I think there is some underlying but overanalyzed truths in the CDPR claims. Losing talent to Warhorse, sure. Both are Polish studios of some renown so if a low or mid tier CDPR employee was offered a promotion and coinciding pay raise then why wouldn't they accept the offer believing it could further their career? Also, after Witcher 3 release there was massive backlash about crunch and work-life balance, a smaller studio might possibly offer a better situation. Endy could be misreading the tealeaves, it's not DEI forcing people out the door, it's competitive opportunities. Unreal 5 is likely a reaction to Cyberpunks release and the cost of keeping an internal engine competitive. Gaming overall are seeing titles released with elements, or whole titles even, being heavily influenced by the creators political leanings. More often than not these games crash and burn with Dustborn being the best example to date. Gamers like games for different reasons, I like them largely for escapism and having identity politics shoved into fantasy RPGs does a lot to ruin suspension of disbelief and the atmosphere of the setting.
Definitely agree regarding CDPR, talent that has left is most likely due to natural causes and not a backlash to DEI policies. Regarding games failing due to political leanings I don't agree because many of those games had issues which were completely unrelated to inclusion. All my life, every year, most games fail, and a few succeed. Now all of a sudden people want to say that games are failing due to having so many women or pride flags. That doesn't make sense.
Thank you. These folks who have never run companies will bemoan "DEI" like it is a bad word. One of the most important findings in Psychology has been the idea of "implicit bias". Everyone has it, be they black, white, male, female or whatever. Most successful DEI practices are ones which help the people recruiting and promoting over come their implicit biases and make objective decisions. Large companies like Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and smaller companies Larian studios all have DEI policies and are all incredibly successful. The whole DEI = no merit argument tells me how shallow a person's understanding of these policies is.
So an intentional part of DEI was to obfuscate itself with Diversity more broadly. The Economist has a pretty good series on the birth of DEI (and related excesses), which are born out of a very specific brand of 2020-era largesse. DEI has proven to be extremely costly and extremely counterproductive, and simply isn't sustainable in the modern economic world of corporate debt actually functioning the way that debt does. When Meta stated in mid-2023 that they had already kicked most of their DEI to the curb and were throwing more out, they didn't mean they weren't still hiring with an eye for a diverse, inclusive workforce. They just meant they were kicking out a very specific form of grifter. This makes it absolutely impossible to gauge what anyone means in the modern era. Because CDPR can say they're all about diversity and inclusion - every company says this - and can at the same time have no DEI initiatives (quotas, preferential promotions/hiring, equity initiatives, etc). Sortof like how ESG backed a lot of initiatives that were actually awful for all three of the things in its acronym, but because of what they called it, we now have to be idiots and think coal-powered electric cars are pro-environment.
Meta didn't cut their DEI program because it didn't work. They cut it because it was no longer as profitable to have a DEI program as it was when the George Floyd protests were occurring. Yes a grift ended but it wasn't by DEI employees, the grift was being executed by Meta itself.
@@SlanderedGaming The timeline doesn't line up for me with regards to them just dropping it. The Economist article that comes to my mind here is "America is becoming less 'woke'" (paywalled, but you can find it on archive sites lol), which ran a count and analysis of terms that you'd associate with DEI in articles, earnings calls, shares of jobs at companies, etc. alongside polling on similar initiatives. 2022 was a pretty stark peak of them, and you find them all drop precipitously late in the year. To me, that seems tethered right to the interest hike in Q3, which deathknelled the sister-corporate-philosophy of ESG in like, two months. When you dig into what Meta / Alphabet / etc cut in 2023 regarding DEI, a ton of it was these consultancies whose impacts were dubious or apprenticeship programs in which apprentices complained they weren't being compensated as much as the engineers they were apprenticing under. The specific prescriptions of DEI as a corporate philosophy are extremely expensive in a world of interest rates. The Floyd mention is also instructive. I'd guess that 99% of people who were in favor of "reform the police" didn't at all mean "defund the police," and yet that specific ideology managed to grab the sails and direct the broader reform movement. Fast-forward a few years, and every city that slashed its police budget in 2020-21 has increased it above 2020-levels, wants more cops than 2020, and has done pretty much nothing to address any of the myriad issues that still persist, even if they curiously don't get media airtime anymore. Police reform has become politically dead and toxic, and the "defund" socialites who drove it into the ground merrily moved on to something else to pretend to care about on twitter, leaving a lot of people screwed over without recourse and undoing tons of delicate legal and political work so they could get some likes. To me, that's the same thing I worry about with DEI. DEI is a specific corporate philosophy which has made itself a stand-in for diversity. When most people think of diversity or inclusion, they don't think of quotas or hierarchical promotion or endless meetings and sermons or browbeating people about their privilege - they think of "treat everyone the way you'd treat yourself." Along comes a specific corporate ideology that says "I am what diversity means," along comes a backlash to that corpo-ideology, and that backlash can spill over into diversity and inclusion more generally: things which the country has been moving intently towards for decades at this point. Like, ESG and DEI are essentially sitting on their deathbed as corpo philosophies, and yet somehow they're still this wild animus for half of the political class - that's got me worried. of course, there's also not really much any individual person can do so long as people continue to consume an unhealthy amount of social media lol
Diversity is most definitely not the enemy, but DEI practices most definitely are. I will say this as a mixed race guy, myself. CDPR promotes mentorships for *only women* (whatever they make out as a woman). It's all for that sweet, sweet other thing that CDPR made a video about; ESG money from Blackrock and such. I'm not sure how anyone can say the CEO is not a liar with their DEI mission statements on their site, the sexist practices they have, and their ESG video from a few years back. DEI does, and always will, promote companies to pick someone who checks more boxes. That is *not* a fair way to hire someone. If the application has everything exactly the same, but the company sees the race or gender and makes the final decision on those characteristics, then it's a racist and/or sexist practice. There's no two ways about it. If the application didn't have those characteristics and either candidate is chosen because they are similar in merit, it's fine. It may suck for the person not chosen, but at least they didn't have to be excluded based on immutable characteristics. The companies do this for more investment money from large investors who have a vested interest in such, like Blackrock and their "we are forcing change" stance with giving companies more money for such practices. Endymion is still right in most aspects. The CEO lied about hiring on merit, evident by their own website. I believe you may have cherry picked the wrong points, as well. The engine is still a mess. The new engine update completely screwed with Witcher 3. Worse performance is the least of the problems with it, but man did it run worse. CDPR most definitely didn't save themselves and C2077 is still nothing that they promised, even with the update. No one was talking about the failure that was Cyberpunk 2077 until a certain piece of media came out that was a sleeper hit that took the anime and gaming world by storm. That's right, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. They made an entire patch entitled "Edgerunners" to capitalize off of that. That paid off, well, too. I don't blame them. It's just good business sense. It's like the Fallout show causing a boost in Fallout 4 sales, even though Fallout 4 was released almost a decade ago. Again, diversity is not the enemy. Tempting companies with brownie points (ESG money) for having a "diverse" workforce is. Especially when they hire people that will literally say they hate gamers, want the industry to burn down, that one political side should be "purged"/"forced out of gaming"/banned, and just want to use gaming for activism. No one on the anti-DEI side complained about Mike Pondsmith. If anything, he's been a beacon of hope for C2077 back to when the gaming media was calling the him racist for the Voodoo Boys. No one complained about him in the 90's, either, with the other Cyberpunk game on the SEGA (iirc). His merits are clear from tabletop to videogame. I don't care what people look like. From Nightcrawler (X-Men) to CJ (San Andreas) to Fenris (DA2), I enjoy characters who are nothing like me, have different looks, and viewpoints. Variety is the spice of life, to me. You and I definitely don't look anything alike (I still got my hair XD) and I still come to enjoy your and others content, even if you do not look or think like myself. I say this because I already see "the people that complain about DEI are racists and just don't want to see anything other than white people". I am not white. I will still deride the practice. I know you and I may disagree on the politics of this, but that's fine. I will still come to enjoy your gaming content. :)
DEI is 100% about earning more money and NO QUESTION CDPR is enacting DEI policies to garner more financial support. That doesn't mean DEI practices are wrong.
What is wrong with the woman only mentorship? Reducing DEI to just the company checking more boxes seems more like you making DEI into the enemy you want it to be. Even if it's purely for earning money on the companies part, if it even partly benefits the workers and consumers *that is a good thing*. I was and still am very scorned over the release of Cyberpunk 2077, even with all the praise it gets now I think no of us should forget what they did. But it wasn't only Edgerunners that revived the game. I am going to go out on a limb and say it was all the patches they put into the game over the yeas after release along with the base game story/writing being very good. Oh and the phenomenal DLC... Edgerunners brought people back but it didn't fix the game, the developers did. Where do you get your examples? "they hire people that will literally say they hate gamers, want the industry to burn down, that one political side should be "purged"/"forced out of gaming"/banned, and just want to use gaming for activism." Assuming these are true, is this every DEI hire at every company? I seriously doubt it.
@@scalpingsnake "What is wrong with the woman only mentorship?" Nothing, as long as there are male-only mentorship programs and funds in equal measure.
@slanderedGaming I still have to disagree. It is a hiring practice based on immutable characteristics that will make the company weigh those boxes against the merit of the one with less filled boxes for that money. @scalpingsnake It's sexist? Like, I'm not sure how we can have things to propel one group further without helping others with the same while saying that it is a fair practice, because it 100% is not. I'm with you, there, on the scorn. It was like D3 all over again. The patches helped, but Edgerunnners did, I would estimate, about 70% of the heavy lifting, again, like the Fallout show and Fallout 4. You can go to Google trends, set one term as Cyberpunk Edgerunners and compare it to Cyberpunk 2077 from 8/13/2022 and on to whenever or the whole year. You can see C2077's peak popularity for that year was after the show for that year and every time Edgerunners gets a bump, C2077 gets a large bump. You can see devs on their YT channels or Twitter/X saying such. The Halo dev that doesn't "want to work on games that glorify or fantasize guns", but...works on *Halo*. Black Panther game dev saying some of the most evil stuff possible. Valorant devs have went on full tangents on loving to see ideologically opposed gamers get banned. It's more commonplace than anyone should like to see, and that's just what they will admit in public. I'd say about 80% of devs are great, hardworking, and appreciate their audience. It's just the bad apples that really making them look bad. Most of these bad apples seem to be with the larger companies, too.
There would be no DEI and wokeness complaints if the games were still good. They're not. Hence the push back against DEI. What is so hard to understand here?
The point he is making is that after the supposed DEI hires CDPR's game got a lot better, and that it was due to a lack of proper internal DEI initiatives and only worrying about the outward-facing appearance of diversity that Ubisoft has ended up in the shit. Welcoming and diverse work environments lead to better workers doing better work, especially in creative fields.
@@DeMause no, diverse work environment doesn't lead to better or worse work. Hardworking, talented people work well, and lazy and talentless do not. It is very simple, really. Are you really saying that having a blue haired person in my office will boost productivity? It will, if they are talented, it won't if they're not. Their diverse haircut or orientation won't make any difference on it's own.
@304enjoyer3 DEI is not about hiring a minimum number of blue haired women. It's about making sure that when you hire anyone, including women with blue hair, that they feel comfortable enough in the workplace to be able to focus on doing their job properly.
I recommend staying away from the culture war stuff. Its just angry people crying and then they shut up after the game releases. BG3 had tons if haters before release and it is the best RPG in a long time.
I used to watch Endymion’s channel. He used to make video about Soulslike games but after making a video about Ubisoft devs trashing Elden Ring’s UI he shifted his videos to ones complaining about “woke” games. So it was sad for me to see him just follow the trends of attacking whatever the current target is for the “anti-woke” UA-camrs About the Unreal Engine vs Red engine I remember Bellular talking about that like a year ago when saying that the switch made sense since they can now hire people already familiar with the engine rather than have to train them and have them start from a place of inexperience with a new engine. About DEI people fail to realize that companies don’t do anything if it won’t get them money. They do DEI because the market tells them it helps not because they are trying to activists. DEI is used to help find valuable employees who may be otherwise missed.
This is 100% true. These companies don't actually care about inclusion or even the people it helps to attract. They care about the production and additional revenue they can squeeze out of those individuals. It isn't activism at all, it's absolutely capitalism.
Hmm, so saying it's exclusively merit based is true if they assign extra "merit points" based on identity? Sounds like six of one, half-dozen of another. I'm pretty sure I agree with your take at the 30,000 foot level, and am planning to play DAVG and upcoming CDPR titles, but it seems to me like your view of DEI doesn't match my experience at all - which is in the realm of applying for jobs in a progressive industry as a white guy.
How do you conclude DEI policies are the reason you haven't been getting those roles? Do you know which people have been getting the jobs and what their background is? Why are you certain they are inferior candidates?
@@SlanderedGaming I think you're reading into this a lot more than what I actually said. My most direct experience was my company ignoring degree requirements for diverse candidates who were hired into roles similar to mine. I do have suspicions that if I had a minority status, I'd have a lot more career options - and I have compared myself on paper to some diverse candidates who have gotten the job when I didn't, but it's not like they ever share that type of detail, so all I have is my gut feeling.
Here's a thought experiment, what if brought DEI to the romance novel industry and replaced the nearly all female writers with males instead and try to sell books to a nearly all female audience. How fast would that billion dollar industry collapse..that is what happening with the AAA games industry and movies which are predominately male consumed media.
@@patricklapinski1526 Not at all , I love women and I have a wife and daughter, but I work analytics, understanding market data and what appeals to what specific market is key. If you know the book industry this won't be controversial at all, that female authors can better connect to female readers and male author's can better connect with male readers. Why do you think writing/designing for games is any different. There will always be a small minority that enjoy the opposite, but that's what they are, a minority. Ignoring this fundamental fact is what is collapsing Marvel, Star Wars and the triple AAA games business. You can't ignore what the consumers want just because you have some ideology that pretends people don't like different things. I like true diversity, as in games/movies are made specifically for men or women, that's when you get mega hits because there is a clear focus. Trying to appeal to everything just means you appeal to no one and the output becomes this soft boring product people don't want.
What this Endymion guy fail to understand and say is that REDengine is very difficult to work with for new hires, they have to learn it from scratch which is both time consuming and costly for CDPR. So going for UE has nothing to do with being in dire trouble unless you have a low IQ like these grifters and their fanbase. And last we knew and heard, some of the ex-veteran devs (through their new studio) are still working with CDPR for the remake of the 1st Witcher game, so it's safe to assume they still have a good relationship.
I love this dudes energy. Keep on keeping on sir. However, the problem isnt the dei policies, its the people being hired. Many of them are saying of their own volition that they "hate gamers" and especially white men. Again policy fine, the people are the problem.
ABSOLUTELY. There are many people who have benefited from DEI policies that have quickly proven they are not ready for primetime. The issue is that's true for employees across corporate America regardless of whether that place has DEI policies or not. It doesn't make sense that some employees being incompetent should then mean DEI is a bad thing.
@@SlanderedGaming i think the people saying dei is bad as a blanket statement are dealing with a lot of the same issues as the Democrat/left side of the political isle. They make good points on occasion but they will say the goofiest and sometimes absolute WORST things as slogans because it's easier and faster(looking at the "we're coming for your children" crowd) than saying the whole statement. People lacking time/care weighing in on issues needing some nuance. Regardless I'm enjoying your content sir.
@@relishcakes4525 Ahh yes, who cares that the GOP are literally imposing sexist and racist policies all across the board, when the lefties used a slogan!
Everything you say about DEI is true and yes it can be an important thing to consider when hiring, but the problem you don't mention is that it's definitely not the reason many companies try to follow these instructions. There are economic incentives today to have strong DEI in your businesses and games, while multinational investment firms like Blackrock make no secret of aggressively pushing for this and I guess we will see in a few years if CDPR games after this push are still of the same quality as before. Personally, my very subjective view is that it should simply be illegal to hire people based on their gender, race, religious beliefs, or sexuality. We should be hired based on experience and talent alone. Great people make great games, not a brand, not DEI, not the technology itself, I have a lot more expectations for what Rebel Wolves studio (former CDPR developers) and Archetype Entertainment (former Bioware developers) are doing than anything related to what's left of the brand they left behind.
So I'm not disagreeing with anything you said but in regards to the rumor around Warhorse poaching talent -- it's not that unreasonable and here's why. CDPR has ballooned in developers and while we as the public see this as a good thing, they had to undergo MASSIVE restructuring to ensure more quality products while still allowing creatives to be creative. The result of this restructuring was Phantom Liberty and now Witcher 4. The former which is great and the next game which will probably be awesome. That said, restructuring tends to cause a culture shift, which may cause some to leave for newer pastures at a studio like Warhorse. Now as for them poaching people in droves - I doubt it. But I bet the way the rumor got started is that they got 1-3 devs from CDPR and then someone got into hyperbole about it. I also want to touch on Bethesda switching to something like Unreal. An engine does not fix structural issues and game design issues. Starfield is a game made by over 400 developers but it feels like it was made by 100. Skyrim, alternatively, is a game made by 100 and feels like 400. Why? The design principles and the people behind it. Bethesda is a studio that works a lot with spontaneity and with the growth they've had, their size does not allow for it. For BS to succeed, it needs more than an engine - a better internal structure and more ambition in terms of quality than quantity. Anyways, I loved the video - please keep up the great work :)
I agree Bethesda's issues go beyond just the game engine at this point and absolutely CDPR is experiencing a shift that would explain some talent leaving. Glad you enjoyed the video!
I watch Asmongold's content a lot and recently found your channel for Rogue Trader guides. I tend toward anti-DEI even regardless of being in that bubble, but you gave me a new way to think about it that I appreciate. Really enjoy your videos, and thanks for your perspective SG!
There are people who just jump on DEI as a single thing implemented in a single way. They point to race swapping characters, cultural appropriation, and a lot of other things as examples of DEI which has become an analog for CRT. Honestly, every American corporation is bound by laws that enforce compliance, and everyone in the corporate world gets yearly compliance training. This is in my opinion correct. Discrimination is stupid and wrong. Many people have relabeled these initiatives WRONGLY as DEI. Take the CDPR example. on their web page they CLEARLY EMBRACE Diversity and Inclusion. What word is missing? Equity. Why? I can't speak for them, but my feeling is that equity is the word here people have a problem with as it is discriminatory. Ibram X Kendi would tell you it is necessary discrimination and I would disagree. As if you saw what I said earlier, discrimination is stupid and wrong. Replace that E with a better E word like equality, and that should solve the problem, I mean it won't, but it should. Your view on this is dead on in my opinion, as I believe that you do not see the E in DEI as exclusionary and discriminatory, and I don't feel like you think it should be. Equity as it is used in the current parlance should be relegated to the dust bin of history. It implies that equality is not enough, that the people who are underrepresented can't compete given a chance with those they would say are over-represented. That is insulting and demeaning to pretty much everyone. I have worked for fortune 500 companies and a diverse workforce is essential in providing products and services to a global audience. I could ramble on for a long time about what I don't like about the use of so-called equity, but that one part of the term shouldn't detract from the rest of it. And jeeesh people. Don't just make shit up to get clicks or make people angry when they shouldn't be. There is plenty of stupid shit done by everybody these days, lets be fair how we call balls and strikes.
TL;DR: Rampant and divisive politicization is bad, good games is good. Also, there are a lot of good indies out there right now, if you are disappointed in AAA, try them. As far as I know, DEI and ESG, at least originally, are basically scores that help potential investors and governments judge how stable the business is, so it doesn't destroy the environment and engage in malicious hiring practices in favor of short term profit. The thing with DEI being considered by some harmful and stifling is, in part, informed by the fact that a lot of companies misuse and abuse these practices to reap maximum benefit while expending minimum effort. The situation is not helped by the, frankly, very divisive and inflammatory political discourse nowadays that very much leans into tribalism - you either with us or against us. I, personally, hold a view that culture resembles a pendulum, something that swings between extremes only briefly reaching equilibrium. It's no secret that a lot of modern day big gaming companies were formed in the 80s and 90s by, generally, small groups of passionate men. When they reached popularity and expanded, they, generally retained that "boys club" culture instead of shifting into more general corpo culture and this had a certain amount of unfortunate side effects, the most egregious and public of them being rampant cases of sexual harassment and general misconduct that only recently came to light. These companies, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA, CDProject - they are no longer small groups of passionate individuals, they are huge publicly traded companies that are focused on profits and are deathly afraid of those profits being affected by scandals and allegations, and, as such, the pendulum swings in another direction. Now, they are all about diversity, inclusivity and tolerance, only this comes in extreme and often cheap and harmful ways. Case in point, Ubisoft after several mismanaged and mediocre games releases and rampant scandals and lawsuits decided to appease it's shareholders and somewhat fix it's reputation by marketing and making it's upcoming AC Shadows very "DEI-compliant" without really putting any effort in it which resulted in a lot of simply baffling and downright offensive inclusions and a thoughtless tokenization of an otherwise very unique and interesting character of Yasuke. But this is only on the corpo side of things, there is also a matter of individual artists, who being generally empathetic human beings, encountered this wave of polarizing political discourse and, in their empathy, feeling that unless they make a loud and obvious political statement with their art supporting their side, they will be supporting the other side, which they now see as literal embodiment of evil instead of human beings just with different opinions on stuff. And, of course, there are, as always, opportunists and grifters who "rock the boat" for their own benefit.
I personally don't think conflicts like this are worth covering. It's just drama. Just play it if you like it. Whatever happens after the dust settles good games will still exist.
Good games will still exist but they may not be the type of games I love to play. I don't play Halo, COD, Valorant, or any games of those types. Therefore I am more protective of developers who focus on titles that are actually in my lane.
I work for small companies so I only had one brush with DEI in which the outsource HR company my boss hired sent a memo about me being the only white guy on the crew and being the crew leader. My boss told them to just make sure payroll was correct. I a not the crew leader because I am white but because I was the one who was willing to be the held responsible in fact of all 10 crews only 3 have white crew leaders. in my case I gathered the "troublemakers" I made a good crew with them because I made a point of not caring what they are but what they could do I treated them has individual people not has a group or a team I gave them a goal to archive and let them do it any way they wanted we quickly figured out who had a talent with the rake who could roll well who could blind side back a truck around a comer I don't care about my crews diverse background I care about their personal abilities and I did not enforce a system on them I let there individuality shine and we do good work
This might be a hot take but i really hope the endimyon dude is putting a good front and he doesn't actually believes that he is a crusader against w0kE gaming , cuz he seems to get more extreme and i doubt that it's healthy for him and the ppl around him irl
A CEO of a big merit driven company feels obliged to come out and denounce a controversial youtuber? Why even react if the 'controversy' is obviosly a false narrative? Afraid for the sales of future games, perhaps? I mean they're created based on merit so what's the issue?
I honestly agree that responding was probably not a good move but I can also understand being tired of people dumping on your damn company all the time. LOL
CDPR sold out once they got listed on the stockmarket in Poland, then it was the move to Canada and embracing ESG. Critcism is getting under their skin now. Why DEI is needed? How does one justify exclusive mentorship programs?
I would love to see a deep dive video about EA's new love for all things AI . How they treated the people they fired and laid off. Then, the why current voice actors of Veilgaurd are on strike regarding AI taking over their careers. How much AI was used in the animation of Veilgaurd, the writing???
If you are a smart company, inclusion aint about quotas, it's about creating teams that aren't assholes. Doesn't guarantee it but it sure helps. The whole CDPR story has no foundation, the talent the story is talking about left ages ago, the "new" team created phantom liberty and the 2.0 update so I don't see any grounds for those accusations. CDPR changed its structure and practices years ago when crunch, abuse and all kinds of *isms became apparent and hurt their bottom line via loss of talent. This is OLD. Since then they had much less turnaround and stable employment.
Feels like he was aiming for all the specific talking points these types of people always go for. Being poached by warhorse is likely because Kingdom come deliverance went for the realistic approach due to it being in a historical setting. There was some controversy back near when it came out I think so I wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if people like Endymion see Warhorse as a team that support their beliefs (even though lack of representation in a game doesn't necessarily have anything to do with diversity within the studio). Really well said. I knew of DEI but your perspective taught me things about it I hadn't even considered.
The moment you mentioned ENDYMIONtv, I knew you were going to show us some baseless, buzzword-laden slander and I was not disappointed. ENDYMIONtv is just another crying-woke UA-cam grifter who probably checks under his bed for Sweet Baby Inc when he goes to bed each night lol.
The other side of this culture war isn't better. Asking for Gamers to be removed, saying that people playing games are bigots and racists, yes, all of them. Mercante wanting to beat people on streets. Using lawsuits to threaten people who speak about her. Rei saying that you should bully developers into their SBI programs. Like all you need to do, is just look up those people, you don't need some random youtuber to see how insane those folk are. Trying to blam everything on one side, while other is calling for people to get shot, is fucking insane.
This is slowly becoming a drama channel I've seen the signs so many times before. I agree with your opinions on DEI btw just not what I subscribed to the channel for.
Drama channel? The only drama I've covered recently is this and Veilguard transferring three choices. Other than that it's all been general gaming news. Don't be sensitive, nothing has changed. :)
@@SlanderedGaming I mean I've watched you since way before the name change and I do think it has changed and I dont feel like I'm being sensitive lol. Im not saying you've become a full on drama channel but you have been covering some drama or made some drama adjacent news videos more and more frequently. You can take a look at your page and see that far fewer videos are positive than they used to be. To be fair it ain't nothing wrong with it objectively you're free to do what you want with your channel I just loved how positive this channel was in a sea of negativity and it's why I subscribed. Best of wishes to you my man I'll keep watching.
Doesn't matter either way. I got Cyberpunk years down the road after their crapshoot of a launch. It's very good now. It was not worth it at release at full price. I no longer place CD Project Red among the 'gold standard'. And that's good. People revered CD Project Red too highly and i suspect it made them overconfident. I'll remember that launch forever. And it will impact how long i wait to buy their product. If i notice it is crappy be it for bugs, political correctness or just atrocious writing i'll skip or wait until it's worth it.
5:43 Ii think everyone cares... it's the director. He was important. Every team needs a leader. 6:22 The unreal engine functionality is way different than the RED engine. The old CDPR devs knew how to use the RED engine and now they're gone... so they moved to the unreal engine for the new employees. 7:59 it doesn't matter how much a game has made the only thing that matters is the skill and merit of the team. Just because the games are different or scale doesn't mean they can't come together and work on a solid game. And they didn't say mass amount went to warhorse they just said poaching. 16:01 so before DEI are you saying gaming devs did not have diversity of thought? And why is DEI bringing up race and gender when we should only think of merit. OK merit and diversity together? How's Concord and Dustborn? They had full reign on those games but where are they?
Every team needs a leader but Director's come and go. I've had periods where our team was led by a different Director literally every year and we all just adjusted. it CAN be indicative of a problem but doesn't automatically mean there is one. According to CDPR they made the change because it was very expensive to keep the RED engine updated to current standards and it was difficult to get new people up to speed because they had to be trained on how to use the new engine. Therefore the change keeps costs manageable while also widening the scope of what kind of talent can be effective at CDPR. If it's just one person then it's not poaching. Poaching implies that multiple people are leaving CDPR for Warhorse. The amount each game has made matters because that attracts people to work on the project. People who take pride in their work love working on big games that they feel confident will be well received. Before DEI, devs who didn't follow a particular culture or train of thought had no vehicle to fight back against harassment and abuse. A great example of this is Tim Cain, the developer who created Fallout & founded Troika Games which went on to create Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. A great deal of his career was spent closeted due to the rampant bias and bigotry he experienced in cultures where he worked. Tim has a UA-cam channel where he has discussed this extensively.
I am pretty sure the cost to train people on how to use RED along with the cost to keep it updated was quite exorbitant. Probably part of what drove them to move towards UE5.
Love your way of explaining diversity. I was part of the diversity ATA project in my own company, the goal was to bring people with different background, to work with regular engineers. I'm working there for five years and I'm helping a lot to bring new ideas and to make space for new people. I truly believe that innovation is driven by bringing different perspectives together.
thank you for your content i apreciate your honest take and perspective which is why i joined your channel thank you for cutting through the bull shit your honesty and experience and perspective is why i trust you as a reliable source on any topic
Despite “the redemption of cyber punk” it never met the promises they made. Only the very first mission has anywhere near the depth to missions like they promised. No one trusts CDPR anymore.
Far from "no one" as mad/ disappointed that'll make you. Even if Cyberpunk wasn't a over promised buggy nightmare of a launch I'm not convinced it would've ever lived up to the insane hype some fans were talking about like it was going to be this perfect mixture of Witcher, Deus Ex, GTA and be the best game ever. Plus as time passes most people stop caring about whatever outrage they had about what x company did, everybody was super mad at Konami for pushing Kojima out of the door and now a decade later eagerly anticipate the MGS remasters. Same will happen when CDPR's next game comes out.
It is funny that companies could make great games without dei policies in the past because only with dei you can realisé the full potential of a group…
The companies made great games while many of the minority devs were treated like shit with no recourse to demand better treatment. Tim Cain (Fallout Creator; Troika Games Founder) talks about this extensively on his UA-cam channel while David Gaider has also talked about it on Twitter. DEI allows a new generation of gamers avenues to fight back against harassment and mistreatment while creating incredible games. That's the difference.
DEI will not make a good game bad. But it will make a bad game worse. It sounds to me like there are bad actors within the DEI framework that prefer to use it as a cudgel against people who dont align with them politically when thats not its intended use. It makes sense why people familiar with it would be confused then to the backlash. As a gamer and consumer, though, i have to be selective. So, if i see a pattern like games with DEI or SBI attached are games that dont interest me or are not fun then, im going to steer away from those games regardless of if DEI is a factor. Also, not looking at this in a vacuum, the more vocal people who champion DEI tend to say some pretty hateful things in a greater sense. So, i also dont want to support people who think that way. Maybe DEI is a good tool thats being misused but it isnt well represented by its proponents.
Unreal engine is a buzz word at this point most gamers know it and like the options Its likely the biggest cash cow of epic games, so its constantly updated and improved. Jumping on unrreal saves valuble time and resources vs updating your on engine that was last used 2->3 years back for a game in a diffetent genre. You also dont need to pay Bill and Jack your terrible employees who are only around because they built the engine and are on vacation 4/12 months. 😂 takes them 6 months to stress test for the new game. Unreal is also really Is accessible, so new devs or devs in trainingTest on it all the time
Bad DEI practice is where you hire people based on their skin color and political view just to fill up a quota.
Good DEI practice is where you hire based on merit, regardless of their skin color and political view.
It's good that it gives the same opportunity to everyone.
DEI is not a solution for workplace harassment because both woke or anti-woke people are capable of doing harassment.
DEI is a solution for workplace harassment because it ensure there's a vehicle victims can use to report the abuse and get it addressed. Otherwise you end up with Ubisoft situations where people are being abused and have no recourse.
Funny ol' world. All the companies I've worked for have had equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policies etc. The only observation I'd like to make is that a company can have policies on paper yet people may behave quite differently in practice.
ABSOLUTELY. Just because you say you have DEI policies doesn't mean you actually do.
You are absolutely correct. We received the results of a survey here at my department from HR just today. Despite our "policy" being diversity and equality, the survey said "Overwhelmingly, the non-management workforce thinks that management denies merit raises, promotions and other recognition to their employees due to favoritism, bias and nepotism." Oh yeah, they do talk a big game, but the reality is, they still only give raises and promotions to the good old boy club. You could look at our hiring policy and believe it to be the very epitome of "woke DEI" and yet that isn't what is really happening at all. Up top, it's still the same old rot.
@@julilla1 Sounds about right. Human nature, I guess. Jobs for the boys and all that. I like the George Carlin quote: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."
I used to notice boyfriends/girlfriends of supervisors being promoted discreetly to similar positions, when their competence was questionable.
Ain't it a hoot.
One thing I've noticed consistently in the places that I've worked is that when it comes to small insular groups, say 20 people or less, they tend to look like the hiring manager for that group. Essentially anyone who looks similar to the manager is benefiting from a positive bias, given a 'free pass' of sorts which fast-tracks the hiring process for them.
This content makes me happy to subscribe to you. More people gotta make an effort to push back against the ridiculous toxic culture war nonsense that only serves to misdirect people away from scummy corporate monetization schemes that have been ruining gaming for the last two decades
Yup that's exactly why I did this video. Thank you!
Really well done and thought out video! Love your content and props for tackling such a controversial topic
Let's not bring up that the TTRPG that Cyberpunk is based on was created by a black man, Michael Alyn Pondsmith. I am sure that was a DEI hire too.
what does the creator have to with this discussion?
That's a pretty awful thing to say. Why does the creator's skin color matter? He made a great game. I don't care if he's secretly an alien from the Gamma Quandrant; as long as he's not doing anything horrible, then all that matters is, he made a great TTRPG. Everything else is ephemeral.
I can only imagine how much money he has gained from this entire situation. The game absolutely has to have been life changing for him.
@@SamBrockmann I have to remember that sarcasm is not easily expressed on the internet. As a black guy who is into game dev he is one of my heroes. I guess that was not clear.
@@SlanderedGaming Yup! Also he is voices Maximum Mike a DJ in the game. It was his character from the TTRPG who often broke the fourth wall to speak directly to the player
“Endimyon, Grummz and Asmongold say…” you can stop right there, brother. That says all I need to know.
😂
@@briaw40 if asmongold sats A I am shouting B.
@@briaw40 I don't know those other people, but yeah I don't care much for Asmondgold.
He talks big about how bad these companies are, but he still supports them by streaming their games to hundreds of thousands of people. It's all empty talk
That's about it, right there, a pack of cretins who just own their prejudices and say it with their chests.
Lol that's the truth
My take, if their next few games are well made and do well. I will happy.
Same here.
the diversity of thought point is, i think, a really good one. i cant count the number of times ive seen a piece of media or an ad campaign embroiled in some scandal where my first thought is that, evidently, they didnt have enough perspectives looking at the product before it was released, because those perspectives could have easily solved the problem. people have a lot of different backgrounds, so if you want to make a piece of art that appeals to a lot of people, that millions can enjoy and connect to, you need lots of perspectives.
EXACTLY. This is exactly what a lot of people don't understand.
Unfortunately we seem to live in the nightmare of postmodernism where when you repeat things over and over enough, they become true to a large number of people. It's always nice to hear some facts!
Thank you!
That nightmare goes both ways. You've been lied to also. Plus the right wing is coming for ya! Watch out!
It’s almost painful to read some of the comments in this comment section. It seems like several commenters didn’t even watch the video. 😂
But this was a great video. I appreciate your explanation of DEI and its uses from the perspective of someone with experience in corporate America. I think you’re spot on with Ubisoft having a major problem from its infamous sexual harassment scandal a few years ago, which is incredibly damaging to a company both in the hiring space and the consumer space. I’ll be using your points to think about major events in the gaming industry in the future.
Thank you so much! I am glad this video was worth your time.
I was concerned. Glad you are back!
Thanks! I was a Groomsman in a wedding this past weekend so no time for videos. LOL
@@SlanderedGaminghope the wedding was fun!
Great way to break down this issue. A shame the people who need to hear this won't bother listening because they just want to be angry at new things.
All I can do is share the information. :)
dont ask questions. just consume products.
Lol yup
Or at the very least don't make things up. CDPR is losing lots of talent to Warhorse? Let's be serious here. LOL
@@SlanderedGamingyeah I don’t know how much of that claim is true. Seems far fetched to me without a list of names
Devs blast UA-camrs then get their own social media posts, business policy and website mission shown to them 🤣
That was hilarious the way people combed through CDPR's website. 😂
@@SlanderedGaming It wasn't combing since it was front and center on their website. The CEO was just out and out lying.
SG clearly has experience as a leader.
Great video, Slandered. It's really nice hearing about these situations from a different, informed perspective. I think it's easy for people to see things like Dustborn and the whole Sweet Baby situation crash and burn and see that failure as an inevitability with all things related to DEI, and honestly, I wasn't sure on my thoughts before this video.
Thanks for your personal insight here.
It's my pleasure dude glad you enjoyed it!
When Cyberpunk released CDPR stock was at $31.00 a share (Dec 2020), but by the time the fallout of the botched cyberpunk launch and the years of fallout they dropped down to a low of $4.19 a share (Sep 2022). This is devastating.
Much more recently In the last year CDPR stock went from $5.99 a share up to $10.15 a share. It's objectively almost doubled in value with whatever they are doing differently now. Probably Witcher 4 updates, a pretty good cyberpunk expansion, etc led to this, IMO.
Exactly. This company was on the brink and RECENT changes have had a massive positive impact.
These culture war tourists are annoying AF.
Yup I am getting tired of it dude.
The worst part is these culture war tourists used to complain that “woke” people don’t know know games or the histories of the franchises they were working on.
Looks like the anti-sjws were always projecting.
Why would a Ubisoft insider know anything about the inner workings of CDPR? Like you I have worked in the corporate world for many years and in my view, if you have a good DEI policy you are not hiring underqualified people, you are hiring people who are often OVERLOOKED. People that do not look like the standard corporate mould often have to work harder than people that do, so as long as this is not the SOLE reason to hire someone, having a diverse range of viewpoints can be very beneficial.
EXACTLY. That's exactly the way DEI is supposed to work.
Great way to break this down!
Thank you!
Thank you so much for talking about this! I didn't expect this channel of all things to be weighing in on this whole culture war nightmare but I'm impressed with how thorough you were
Yup my pleasure. I won't do this all the time but every so often I'll dip my toes in!
It’s funny how industry jargon can take over your brain. Every time I see someone getting super bent out of shape over DEI, I have a moment of confusion at why everyone’s all up in arms about Dose Equivalent Iodine before I remember that I’m not at work.
Then I remember that people getting bent out of shape about DEI practices makes about as much sense as if people were having strong reactions to the concept of using I-131 as a measuring stick for how dangerous an area is
😂😂
Also, I hope and pray to the gods this channel stays a channel about gaming...and not politics.
You don't have to worry this content won't become to norm. Once or twice a month we'll venture into the deep. LOL
Huh... Spellandshield, that's the best example of the pot calling the kettle black.
I migrated from your channel to this one specifically BECAUSE your political opinions and pessimistic attitude were tainting otherwise interesting videos.
@@charliebee5154 What political opinions? I have NEVER talked about politics there. You are conflating politics with pessimism. If you don't like my pessimism, say so but that is NOT political.
As always, excellent video! You make this discussion much easier to understand and discuss ❤🇧🇷
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
Great insights as always. I'm glad you have this platform to share reasonable takes on the subject.
Thanks dude I appreciate it!
Really well thought out dude. Keep up the good work.
Thank you!
Their internal HR problems notwithstanding, Ubisoft is going belly up because for the past decade they've mostly been delivering uninspired, bloated games with priority-one cash shops designed to keep people spending on boosts, cosmetics, and other ephemera. Their open-world formula is stale and people who prioritize game quality and may not even be aware of the culture wars stuff are starting to punish them for it.
I played AC Valhalla a year or so ago and remember watching a video after getting bored of it whose title perfectly encapsulates modern Ubi's problem - they make games for no one. AC Valhalla has all this stuff - stealth, melee & ranged combat, exploration, diverse missions, a cinematic story, a progression system... And yet, none of these systems are particularly deep or engaging. There's certainly a 100-hour game to be had there, but it just gets boring after a while no matter what your playstyle is.
I agree their games are bloated and sometimes uninspired but I feel the same way about CoD, Madden and some other franchises. I don't think game design tells the full story about their fall.
Long time watcher, first time poster. This was an absolutely terrible decision. Look at the people in the comment section calling each other the worst things possible. Politics in gaming never ends well. It brings out the absolute worst in people. I hope this isn't a new approach to the channel and you get back to games and avoid politics.
I think the point about merit and DEI being compatible was well made in this video.
Having work experience rather than degrees; being able to work well with people of all walks of life; having a complementary rather than replicative background and approach to problem solving etc. can all be considered MERIT.
But unless you actually consider diversity to be something positive, you might not realize that these things are merits. Not merits to be considered to the exclusion of all else, but merits nonetheless.
Having been at a great many companies as a consultant for more than a decade, it was clear to me pretty quickly that the more heterogeneous a company was in the make up of its people, the more well adjusted it was.
The more homogenous, the more likely that there would be problems that they themselves were blind to, because every person was basically the same person, with the same approach, and the same skills.
If you go for merit, and truly consider ALL relevant variables, the end result will NOT be copy-pasting the same person over and over again. That would assume a very constrained definition of what merit is.
Anecdotal, but this has been my experience.
EXACTLY. This sums up my point EXACTLY.
This was a great, nuanced take, which unfortunately means it will not see nearly as much as exposure as Enymion's hot take, I hate that about the algorithm, but it is what it is. I also have decades of corporate experience, and agree with much of what you said. I will say, though, that there is one practice that has been dominating entertainment lately that I do not like, which is mandated inclusivity in writing and casting. It feels forced and fake, which kills immersion for me. I want to see diverse creators given free rein to craft the characters of the story they want to tell. If that means the cast is all black, or all white, or all whatever, that's fine so long as it fits the story they want to tell. I don't like the idea of writers being presented with a checklist saying each game or show must have 2 of this, 3 of that, etc. We do not need to make everything look like the population of Los Angeles.
I agree the inclusion has to be a natural result of improved hiring practices.
14:01 you made it plain here. TLDR this is what people need to know.
Yup that pretty much sums it up.
Company makes game. Check reviews. If game looks good and suits your tastes, buy it. If it looks bad or not your style, don't buy it.
Unless you're a shareholder, your interest in the company is 100% contrived.
I know it's easy and fun to get emotionally invested in the company, but considering how much is "he said / she said", it's just throwing your energy out the window.
I mean if it's that interesting to you, by all means.
My career in data has a lot of ties to equitable business practices, and yeah no thanks. This stuff is complex and not worth your time and energy unless you know you're working with reliable data. Likely outcome is you get angry over something you personally have no control over.
If you decide to get into legislation or corporate leadership, sure yeah this is interesting to follow.
To most of us out here, I suggest we try to avoid letting our emotions get caught up in a tornado of questionable information.
To be clear, the intent of my comment here is simply to remind people that they might risk spinning their wheels over a muddy perspective of the outsider.
If you find yourself upset, rest assured you're opting in and running on a fraction of the story.
Content creators make money on views. Being vocal. Outrage sells. You are the profit for them. If you are outraged, it's usually by design. Controversy gets views.
(Except Slandered, he cool)
Thanks I appreciate it! LOL
Endymion made a follow up video to this
Interesting I'll have to check that out.
If you hire based on anything other than merit, you will get anything other than merit. Nobody wants to work with people who aren't qualified, feel entitled to "contribute" bad ideas, and cry racism when rebuked. It's a never ending cycle that has seen the destruction of the games industry over the last 14 or so years. Good devs will leave/retire and there will be no one left in the industry capable of creating the quality we had a decade ago -- it's pretty much happened already.
yes a fictional employee that contributes bad ideas and cries racism when rebuked is a problem, and totally not that all major games are released by soulless corporations that view games not as a revenue stream, but as capital whose sole purpose is to increase the value for shareholders through stock buy backs. Yes its that pesky pink haired strawman I constructed in my brain that is the real issue here, the system is fine. Anything so I don't have to critically think about anything and educate myself or - god forbid! - gain some material understanding of the world. Easier to just lash into whatever randos on the internet tell me the real issue is, while I turn the blind eye to sociopathic billionaires destroying the hobby I love just so their magic line can go up.
Yeah I'm sure it's rando zoomer coders ruining the game industry, not the execs. Totally checks out.
@@KingslayerSrb those soulless corporations you mention who do embrace ESG and DEI, you think they do it from the goodness of their heart? Or maybe those pictures of 'pesky pink haired strawman' they present on official websites are fake?
Strawman. It's the greedy corpos that are the problem. I doubt there's very many people in the games industry like what you've described above.
If you hire based solely on a person's resume then you end up with a Ubisoft situation where "qualified" leaders harassed and abused women on their team for years. Merit must take into account a person's skills and their capability to lead/work with those who are completely different. In no way, shape, form, or fashion is this rocket science.
Let me share my perspective. I'm not going to attack anybody during this tirade. I'm simply trying to put my personal opinion out there.
First let's talk about DEI/ESG. When it comes to DEI/ESG there are couple issues but the most important one right now is that both sides of conflict are wagging their fingers at their opponents. Nobody likes being called bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe and whatnot and calling people names was one of the first tactics to be employed. Why? How does it help anyone? It only makes the other side defend their turf even more. What's worse pushing the topic relentlessly has trained the public to see patterns. Mankind as a whole survived based on pattern recognition, from spotting snakes (we still have evolutionary fear of them) to intuitively understanding that some sounds/articulations mean danger. Pattern recognition is mankind's strength and weakness at the same time and it is this way because we had to be able to make snap judgements. Do I agree with any of the side? I have more in common with DEI rejecting side but then again I come from a corporate background with a very poorly implemented DEI initiative to the point that it is used as a club to hit employees on their heads. Either way the problem is that there is no discussion, there is a trench warfare.
Now when it comest to CDPR and their statements... I'm from Poland and until year 2020 I could very happily call myself fan of CDPR. I bought CP2077 in preorder on GOG. Man, I was burnt heavily by that game. I don't appreciate board members lying about the state of the game and saying that the game is running surprisingly well on consoles of older generation even though I'm a PC player. I don't appreciate the way the company mistreated the employees and mishandled the title. Yes, it was terribly mishandled when it comes to implementation. Imagine that middle/upper management wanted something implemented one week to abandon the idea next week and doing so multiple times throughout the production. This is time and resource mismanagement problem of enormous scale. It also caused crunch again because thanks to the mentioned board member the investors were pushing for the release. I still don understand why the hell the game was strongly advertised as such where your past (street kid, corpo, nomad) will have enormous meaning and will heavily influence the story. Spoiler alert - it's not doing that at all. This might have been one of these ideas put back and forth. When it comse to the scandalous launch the whole shtick was so bad for me that even now when CDPR announces anything new relating to CP2077 I tend to ask them whether it is running "surprisingly well" or if I will have to change in my setup. For example I did so with Edgerunners Netflix series where I asked if it's running surprisingly well on older tv or if I will be forced to buy a new one. I do this for one simple reason - to make them remember that any and I mean any fuckup like that will be remembered for a very long time. I want to believe in CDPR's mission statement but it will be a very long time before I will be able to trust them again. I'm not saying I won't buy their next title, I'm saying there won't be preorder from me.
That is all of this long and unnecessary tirade of mine.
Yup that's why I was very careful not to disparage Endymion. I've seen people call him a bigot and all sorts of other things but I don't think that actually helps the conversation. It just automatically jades one side. So instead let's just deal with the content of what's being said.
@@SlanderedGaming true and thank you for keeping it cool and level headed.
I'm glad you made this video because it proved I was wrong about you, for that I am sorry.
Endymion went from saying pretty suspect things to dropping the facade and showed me who he really is.
From my understanding, DEI came about to try and stop companies from passing over a more qualified person for someone else because they don't fit a certain demographic.
Uh oh what did you think about me before?! 😂 All good glad you enjoyed the video.
@@SlanderedGaming The way you talked about some things led me to believe you were like the people you mentioned in the video.
Excellent! Some people are too young to remember when NOT being hired because you weren't white or male was the norm, and seem to be demanding more sexism and racism/
Just trying to provide a little perspective. LOL
As a woman applying for jobs, I remember being grilled about whether I was considering a pregnancy in the short or long term future. Like I was literally supposed to try to convince them I'd never have children because it might inconvenience the workplace if I went on maternity leave. Wild shit.
👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 💯
People are just old enough to live through not being hired because you're white and/ or male though.
@@cristiancojocaru9821 I've sat on many interviews and promotion boards. Not ONCE has white male lost out on a position due to his race.
this is such a wonderful take. diversity is not an attack on white men. people who get mad about it are just revealing their true selves.
Absolutely more diversity actually helps everyone.
Great to hear another perspective.
Thank you!
when Asmond is mentioned- you should add a CGI Roach running across your Cap Shield eachtime. LOL
for every mention- Asmond sends a friend from Joes Apartment
😂😂
I really hate these political hate youtube channels that just stir the pot for views. I won't click on those channels, but I will support this channel.
Thanks I appreciate it. Won't dive into this topic all the time but this one caught my attention.
@@SlanderedGaming it's all good. On a side note, while watching this video I thought back on the progress of your channel, being one of the OG viewers, before the channel name change! Glad you are still at it, after all the ups and downs of your personal life.
7:49 😂😂😂 this is the analysis I cane for
😂😂
Thank you very much. You do this kind of content in a great neutral but clear way.
My pleasure! Glad you enjoyed it. :)
I don't care about rumors... when the games come, we will see.
Witcher 4 cannot come soon enough!
I really dislike these types of discussions videos due to how politicize it inevitable becomes and the comments certainly confirms that feeling.
Really hope that this isn’t a indicator for future videos since the reasons why I like it was the non political gaming coverage.
These won't be the type of videos I do on a regular basis but I also won't be afraid of discussing certain topics every so often.
I will be blunt; I am not political at all. When people start talking politics, my ears just tune out; I don't vote and I don't care. I fucking HATE politics of any sort, right, left, whatever but what I hate even more than politics is taking said real world politics and shoving them into games. Games have their own universes and worlds with their own histories and cultures and game makers can and have explored all sorts of divisive issues WITHIN the context of those games...rather than bringing in toxic (yes, using the actual meaning of the word) real world politics that just make people hate each other more than they already do. I have had up to my ears with the so-called culture war and both sides, left AND right. I wish they would just piss off and duke it out elsewhere and I don't know if it is DEI or not but I do know that games have become less daring than they used to be and they take fewer chances AND it is hard to miss, the character designs are just getting uglier and uglier and it is impossible to ignore. I guarantee you that no woman will look remotely as attractive as Triss or Yennifer in the next Witcher game and all of this IRL politics in games makes it impossible to tell interesting and difficult stories. For example, people love the story of the Krogan and the genophage...well you could NEVER tell that story in the current year because of the implications of the Krogan being this brutal, bellicose race that blew their planet up and threatened the galaxy...because someone would claim you could offend someone in the real world with that story arc. Politics in games destroys art, which is what games are, because it limits the stories you can tell to the party line you are supposed to toe. I would say the same thing if it were extreme right wing politics in games. All politics in games does is create strife, division and hatred AND worst of all it usually leads to bad games. Owlcat is my favourite studio; you know why? They just try to make good games and focus on the setting. I am currently playing Rogue Trader after your video and even though I will never be a WH40K fan I see how much love and attention Owlcat put into the game and why the 40K fans love it so much. It is exceptionally well done. If more studios just focused on making good games so much of this endless and tiresome culture war crap would die down…I just want studios to focus on making games and leave the politics out of it; everyone would benefit, even the people pushing the politics.
This. Even if it's DEI. Why is it more necessary today? Especially when there are still people white as snow, black as charcoal l, and yellow as sulfur that have been working on games.
It's interesting to hear you talk about a modern unwillingness to tackle difficult subjects in modern gaming. That's been a huge focus of the Dragon Age series and I am REALLY curious to find out if Veilguard is going to go soft. It's definitely something I will cover in my review.
@@SlanderedGaming So am I; it is why I am still willing to give the game a chance even if everyone looks like playdo.
Having just finished a demon run in Wrath, I gotta agree about Owlcat. There's so much dark moments and things your character can do on an evil path and many horrifying things you can see on the good paths. And it all fits withing that games universe, and they clearly didn't let modern day stuff scare them away from showing it.
Makes me laugh when people say they aren't political and then proceed to share an opinion. You might not want to fuck with politics but politics will fuck with you....
The uglier character designs argument is just fucking weird, what even makes you think that?
This whole DEI thing seems like pushing something thats already there?! How did this whole thing start?
No previously merit didn't consider your ability to work with women or people from different cultures. That's a corporate shift.
Sadly, I think the people who are the most vocal / outspoken about DEI (or any "hot topic") are usually the ones who know the least about them. I feel like Endymion falls into this grouping.
Yup I definitely agree.
I think people have a right to be concerned about this because any time you introduce things like DEI, you are introducing bureaucracy, where decisions are made by a select few, maybe outsiders, who don't necessarily understand the audience they are selling to. This also adds bloat to the budgets which the consumer ends up paying for. That said, if the product is good and affordable, it doesn't matter.
Everything you just mentioned is absolutely a concern but the only people who can regulate it are in the company. We have no way of knowing what's really happening.
It seems to me that if dei works well, then the game could benefit greatly from it. But if handled poorly, then the game could suffer horribly from it.
I wouldn't argue with that.
Setting aside the underlying argument, it seems really clear to me that the CDPR Co-CEO should not have posted a reply to that youtuber. At some level they do need to reply when they are getting mischaracterized, but responding directly to a critic seems like a universally bad decision.
Honestly I agree he should've left it alone.
I would argue there is something to be said about the DEI argument and that it has affected some companies more than others. Mostly Ubisoft and companies like Deep Silver basically made that the center of some of their recent games like the next Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 6, and the Saint's Row reboot. These particular products were designed to be as least offensive and inclusive as possible and it has backfired for those companies. However the biggest problem this generation has had; at least for PC gaming is technical performance. There is a technical and skill deficit that appears to be related to having enough people who know how to work with DX12 and Vulcan and consumers have suffered from this as the industry builds this foundational knowledge. I hope by the time the next Witcher or Cyberpunk comes out they have this API problem solved and we start to see the performance gains this generation of hardware is supposed to be bringing.
There are absolutely some gaming companies who have implemented DEI policies poorly. That doesn't mean DEI in and of itself is evil. It means developer need to do a better job.
100% agree Slandered Gaming. I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming Witcher & Cyberpunk games from CDPR.
Absolutely! Both of them will be must play games for sure!
Great video! Thank you
My pleasure!
I appreciate your insight about this topic and ripping the bandaid off. It’s frustrating to see practically everything get slapped with the “woke/DEI/SBI!” drama tag. What’s next? Oxygen is woke?
Yeah that's my perspective it's getting old to see the same conversation over and over again.
Thank you for stepping in here and being a voice or reason.
My pleasure!
I think there is some underlying but overanalyzed truths in the CDPR claims. Losing talent to Warhorse, sure. Both are Polish studios of some renown so if a low or mid tier CDPR employee was offered a promotion and coinciding pay raise then why wouldn't they accept the offer believing it could further their career? Also, after Witcher 3 release there was massive backlash about crunch and work-life balance, a smaller studio might possibly offer a better situation. Endy could be misreading the tealeaves, it's not DEI forcing people out the door, it's competitive opportunities. Unreal 5 is likely a reaction to Cyberpunks release and the cost of keeping an internal engine competitive.
Gaming overall are seeing titles released with elements, or whole titles even, being heavily influenced by the creators political leanings. More often than not these games crash and burn with Dustborn being the best example to date. Gamers like games for different reasons, I like them largely for escapism and having identity politics shoved into fantasy RPGs does a lot to ruin suspension of disbelief and the atmosphere of the setting.
Warhorse are Czech I believe.
@@EoinLynch-v1y Correct.
Definitely agree regarding CDPR, talent that has left is most likely due to natural causes and not a backlash to DEI policies. Regarding games failing due to political leanings I don't agree because many of those games had issues which were completely unrelated to inclusion. All my life, every year, most games fail, and a few succeed. Now all of a sudden people want to say that games are failing due to having so many women or pride flags. That doesn't make sense.
Warhorse is Czech company. Not Polish.
Thank you. These folks who have never run companies will bemoan "DEI" like it is a bad word. One of the most important findings in Psychology has been the idea of "implicit bias". Everyone has it, be they black, white, male, female or whatever. Most successful DEI practices are ones which help the people recruiting and promoting over come their implicit biases and make objective decisions. Large companies like Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and smaller companies Larian studios all have DEI policies and are all incredibly successful. The whole DEI = no merit argument tells me how shallow a person's understanding of these policies is.
Yup that's exactly it.
So an intentional part of DEI was to obfuscate itself with Diversity more broadly. The Economist has a pretty good series on the birth of DEI (and related excesses), which are born out of a very specific brand of 2020-era largesse. DEI has proven to be extremely costly and extremely counterproductive, and simply isn't sustainable in the modern economic world of corporate debt actually functioning the way that debt does. When Meta stated in mid-2023 that they had already kicked most of their DEI to the curb and were throwing more out, they didn't mean they weren't still hiring with an eye for a diverse, inclusive workforce. They just meant they were kicking out a very specific form of grifter.
This makes it absolutely impossible to gauge what anyone means in the modern era. Because CDPR can say they're all about diversity and inclusion - every company says this - and can at the same time have no DEI initiatives (quotas, preferential promotions/hiring, equity initiatives, etc). Sortof like how ESG backed a lot of initiatives that were actually awful for all three of the things in its acronym, but because of what they called it, we now have to be idiots and think coal-powered electric cars are pro-environment.
Meta didn't cut their DEI program because it didn't work. They cut it because it was no longer as profitable to have a DEI program as it was when the George Floyd protests were occurring. Yes a grift ended but it wasn't by DEI employees, the grift was being executed by Meta itself.
@@bartoffer DEI initiatives are a valuable tool. It is possible to misuse the tool. Why do you want to blame the tool and not the people misusing it?
@@SlanderedGaming The timeline doesn't line up for me with regards to them just dropping it. The Economist article that comes to my mind here is "America is becoming less 'woke'" (paywalled, but you can find it on archive sites lol), which ran a count and analysis of terms that you'd associate with DEI in articles, earnings calls, shares of jobs at companies, etc. alongside polling on similar initiatives. 2022 was a pretty stark peak of them, and you find them all drop precipitously late in the year.
To me, that seems tethered right to the interest hike in Q3, which deathknelled the sister-corporate-philosophy of ESG in like, two months. When you dig into what Meta / Alphabet / etc cut in 2023 regarding DEI, a ton of it was these consultancies whose impacts were dubious or apprenticeship programs in which apprentices complained they weren't being compensated as much as the engineers they were apprenticing under. The specific prescriptions of DEI as a corporate philosophy are extremely expensive in a world of interest rates.
The Floyd mention is also instructive. I'd guess that 99% of people who were in favor of "reform the police" didn't at all mean "defund the police," and yet that specific ideology managed to grab the sails and direct the broader reform movement. Fast-forward a few years, and every city that slashed its police budget in 2020-21 has increased it above 2020-levels, wants more cops than 2020, and has done pretty much nothing to address any of the myriad issues that still persist, even if they curiously don't get media airtime anymore. Police reform has become politically dead and toxic, and the "defund" socialites who drove it into the ground merrily moved on to something else to pretend to care about on twitter, leaving a lot of people screwed over without recourse and undoing tons of delicate legal and political work so they could get some likes.
To me, that's the same thing I worry about with DEI. DEI is a specific corporate philosophy which has made itself a stand-in for diversity. When most people think of diversity or inclusion, they don't think of quotas or hierarchical promotion or endless meetings and sermons or browbeating people about their privilege - they think of "treat everyone the way you'd treat yourself." Along comes a specific corporate ideology that says "I am what diversity means," along comes a backlash to that corpo-ideology, and that backlash can spill over into diversity and inclusion more generally: things which the country has been moving intently towards for decades at this point. Like, ESG and DEI are essentially sitting on their deathbed as corpo philosophies, and yet somehow they're still this wild animus for half of the political class - that's got me worried.
of course, there's also not really much any individual person can do so long as people continue to consume an unhealthy amount of social media lol
Diversity is most definitely not the enemy, but DEI practices most definitely are. I will say this as a mixed race guy, myself. CDPR promotes mentorships for *only women* (whatever they make out as a woman). It's all for that sweet, sweet other thing that CDPR made a video about; ESG money from Blackrock and such. I'm not sure how anyone can say the CEO is not a liar with their DEI mission statements on their site, the sexist practices they have, and their ESG video from a few years back.
DEI does, and always will, promote companies to pick someone who checks more boxes. That is *not* a fair way to hire someone. If the application has everything exactly the same, but the company sees the race or gender and makes the final decision on those characteristics, then it's a racist and/or sexist practice. There's no two ways about it. If the application didn't have those characteristics and either candidate is chosen because they are similar in merit, it's fine. It may suck for the person not chosen, but at least they didn't have to be excluded based on immutable characteristics. The companies do this for more investment money from large investors who have a vested interest in such, like Blackrock and their "we are forcing change" stance with giving companies more money for such practices.
Endymion is still right in most aspects. The CEO lied about hiring on merit, evident by their own website. I believe you may have cherry picked the wrong points, as well.
The engine is still a mess. The new engine update completely screwed with Witcher 3. Worse performance is the least of the problems with it, but man did it run worse.
CDPR most definitely didn't save themselves and C2077 is still nothing that they promised, even with the update. No one was talking about the failure that was Cyberpunk 2077 until a certain piece of media came out that was a sleeper hit that took the anime and gaming world by storm. That's right, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. They made an entire patch entitled "Edgerunners" to capitalize off of that. That paid off, well, too. I don't blame them. It's just good business sense. It's like the Fallout show causing a boost in Fallout 4 sales, even though Fallout 4 was released almost a decade ago.
Again, diversity is not the enemy. Tempting companies with brownie points (ESG money) for having a "diverse" workforce is. Especially when they hire people that will literally say they hate gamers, want the industry to burn down, that one political side should be "purged"/"forced out of gaming"/banned, and just want to use gaming for activism.
No one on the anti-DEI side complained about Mike Pondsmith. If anything, he's been a beacon of hope for C2077 back to when the gaming media was calling the him racist for the Voodoo Boys. No one complained about him in the 90's, either, with the other Cyberpunk game on the SEGA (iirc). His merits are clear from tabletop to videogame.
I don't care what people look like. From Nightcrawler (X-Men) to CJ (San Andreas) to Fenris (DA2), I enjoy characters who are nothing like me, have different looks, and viewpoints. Variety is the spice of life, to me. You and I definitely don't look anything alike (I still got my hair XD) and I still come to enjoy your and others content, even if you do not look or think like myself. I say this because I already see "the people that complain about DEI are racists and just don't want to see anything other than white people". I am not white. I will still deride the practice.
I know you and I may disagree on the politics of this, but that's fine. I will still come to enjoy your gaming content. :)
DEI is 100% about earning more money and NO QUESTION CDPR is enacting DEI policies to garner more financial support. That doesn't mean DEI practices are wrong.
What is wrong with the woman only mentorship?
Reducing DEI to just the company checking more boxes seems more like you making DEI into the enemy you want it to be. Even if it's purely for earning money on the companies part, if it even partly benefits the workers and consumers *that is a good thing*.
I was and still am very scorned over the release of Cyberpunk 2077, even with all the praise it gets now I think no of us should forget what they did. But it wasn't only Edgerunners that revived the game. I am going to go out on a limb and say it was all the patches they put into the game over the yeas after release along with the base game story/writing being very good. Oh and the phenomenal DLC... Edgerunners brought people back but it didn't fix the game, the developers did.
Where do you get your examples? "they hire people that will literally say they hate gamers, want the industry to burn down, that one political side should be "purged"/"forced out of gaming"/banned, and just want to use gaming for activism." Assuming these are true, is this every DEI hire at every company? I seriously doubt it.
@@scalpingsnake "What is wrong with the woman only mentorship?"
Nothing, as long as there are male-only mentorship programs and funds in equal measure.
@slanderedGaming I still have to disagree. It is a hiring practice based on immutable characteristics that will make the company weigh those boxes against the merit of the one with less filled boxes for that money.
@scalpingsnake It's sexist? Like, I'm not sure how we can have things to propel one group further without helping others with the same while saying that it is a fair practice, because it 100% is not.
I'm with you, there, on the scorn. It was like D3 all over again. The patches helped, but Edgerunnners did, I would estimate, about 70% of the heavy lifting, again, like the Fallout show and Fallout 4. You can go to Google trends, set one term as Cyberpunk Edgerunners and compare it to Cyberpunk 2077 from 8/13/2022 and on to whenever or the whole year. You can see C2077's peak popularity for that year was after the show for that year and every time Edgerunners gets a bump, C2077 gets a large bump.
You can see devs on their YT channels or Twitter/X saying such. The Halo dev that doesn't "want to work on games that glorify or fantasize guns", but...works on *Halo*. Black Panther game dev saying some of the most evil stuff possible. Valorant devs have went on full tangents on loving to see ideologically opposed gamers get banned. It's more commonplace than anyone should like to see, and that's just what they will admit in public. I'd say about 80% of devs are great, hardworking, and appreciate their audience. It's just the bad apples that really making them look bad. Most of these bad apples seem to be with the larger companies, too.
There would be no DEI and wokeness complaints if the games were still good. They're not. Hence the push back against DEI. What is so hard to understand here?
The point he is making is that after the supposed DEI hires CDPR's game got a lot better, and that it was due to a lack of proper internal DEI initiatives and only worrying about the outward-facing appearance of diversity that Ubisoft has ended up in the shit.
Welcoming and diverse work environments lead to better workers doing better work, especially in creative fields.
@@DeMause no, diverse work environment doesn't lead to better or worse work. Hardworking, talented people work well, and lazy and talentless do not. It is very simple, really. Are you really saying that having a blue haired person in my office will boost productivity? It will, if they are talented, it won't if they're not. Their diverse haircut or orientation won't make any difference on it's own.
@304enjoyer3 DEI is not about hiring a minimum number of blue haired women. It's about making sure that when you hire anyone, including women with blue hair, that they feel comfortable enough in the workplace to be able to focus on doing their job properly.
I recommend staying away from the culture war stuff. Its just angry people crying and then they shut up after the game releases. BG3 had tons if haters before release and it is the best RPG in a long time.
I used to watch Endymion’s channel. He used to make video about Soulslike games but after making a video about Ubisoft devs trashing Elden Ring’s UI he shifted his videos to ones complaining about “woke” games. So it was sad for me to see him just follow the trends of attacking whatever the current target is for the “anti-woke” UA-camrs
About the Unreal Engine vs Red engine I remember Bellular talking about that like a year ago when saying that the switch made sense since they can now hire people already familiar with the engine rather than have to train them and have them start from a place of inexperience with a new engine.
About DEI people fail to realize that companies don’t do anything if it won’t get them money. They do DEI because the market tells them it helps not because they are trying to activists. DEI is used to help find valuable employees who may be otherwise missed.
This is 100% true. These companies don't actually care about inclusion or even the people it helps to attract. They care about the production and additional revenue they can squeeze out of those individuals. It isn't activism at all, it's absolutely capitalism.
After CYBERPUNK’s launch… you folks honestly believe anything that CEO says…..?
Cmon fellas… you got amnesia?
Hmm, so saying it's exclusively merit based is true if they assign extra "merit points" based on identity? Sounds like six of one, half-dozen of another. I'm pretty sure I agree with your take at the 30,000 foot level, and am planning to play DAVG and upcoming CDPR titles, but it seems to me like your view of DEI doesn't match my experience at all - which is in the realm of applying for jobs in a progressive industry as a white guy.
How do you conclude DEI policies are the reason you haven't been getting those roles? Do you know which people have been getting the jobs and what their background is? Why are you certain they are inferior candidates?
@@SlanderedGaming I think you're reading into this a lot more than what I actually said. My most direct experience was my company ignoring degree requirements for diverse candidates who were hired into roles similar to mine. I do have suspicions that if I had a minority status, I'd have a lot more career options - and I have compared myself on paper to some diverse candidates who have gotten the job when I didn't, but it's not like they ever share that type of detail, so all I have is my gut feeling.
@@greedowins Maybe because what's "on paper" doesn't tell you everything about someone's work ability?
👍🏾👍🏾💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💪🏾💪🏾 I LOVE this channel! Please keep up the good work!
Thank you so much! I really appreciate all of your support!
Here's a thought experiment, what if brought DEI to the romance novel industry and replaced the nearly all female writers with males instead and try to sell books to a nearly all female audience. How fast would that billion dollar industry collapse..that is what happening with the AAA games industry and movies which are predominately male consumed media.
That's not what's happening in the gaming industry because contrary to popular belief, a TON of women buy games.
@@SlanderedGaming ton of women buy mobile games, not tripple A games. It's really factually incorrect statement.
@ponli7532 damn you really a misogynist huh
@@patricklapinski1526 Not at all , I love women and I have a wife and daughter, but I work analytics, understanding market data and what appeals to what specific market is key. If you know the book industry this won't be controversial at all, that female authors can better connect to female readers and male author's can better connect with male readers. Why do you think writing/designing for games is any different. There will always be a small minority that enjoy the opposite, but that's what they are, a minority. Ignoring this fundamental fact is what is collapsing Marvel, Star Wars and the triple AAA games business. You can't ignore what the consumers want just because you have some ideology that pretends people don't like different things. I like true diversity, as in games/movies are made specifically for men or women, that's when you get mega hits because there is a clear focus. Trying to appeal to everything just means you appeal to no one and the output becomes this soft boring product people don't want.
What this Endymion guy fail to understand and say is that REDengine is very difficult to work with for new hires, they have to learn it from scratch which is both time consuming and costly for CDPR. So going for UE has nothing to do with being in dire trouble unless you have a low IQ like these grifters and their fanbase.
And last we knew and heard, some of the ex-veteran devs (through their new studio) are still working with CDPR for the remake of the 1st Witcher game, so it's safe to assume they still have a good relationship.
I love this dudes energy.
Keep on keeping on sir.
However, the problem isnt the dei policies, its the people being hired. Many of them are saying of their own volition that they "hate gamers" and especially white men.
Again policy fine, the people are the problem.
ABSOLUTELY. There are many people who have benefited from DEI policies that have quickly proven they are not ready for primetime. The issue is that's true for employees across corporate America regardless of whether that place has DEI policies or not. It doesn't make sense that some employees being incompetent should then mean DEI is a bad thing.
@@SlanderedGaming i think the people saying dei is bad as a blanket statement are dealing with a lot of the same issues as the Democrat/left side of the political isle. They make good points on occasion but they will say the goofiest and sometimes absolute WORST things as slogans because it's easier and faster(looking at the "we're coming for your children" crowd) than saying the whole statement.
People lacking time/care weighing in on issues needing some nuance.
Regardless I'm enjoying your content sir.
who? which game devs say they hate white men? provide proof.
@@relishcakes4525at least our candidate isn't a traitor?
@@relishcakes4525 Ahh yes, who cares that the GOP are literally imposing sexist and racist policies all across the board, when the lefties used a slogan!
Everything you say about DEI is true and yes it can be an important thing to consider when hiring, but the problem you don't mention is that it's definitely not the reason many companies try to follow these instructions. There are economic incentives today to have strong DEI in your businesses and games, while multinational investment firms like Blackrock make no secret of aggressively pushing for this and I guess we will see in a few years if CDPR games after this push are still of the same quality as before.
Personally, my very subjective view is that it should simply be illegal to hire people based on their gender, race, religious beliefs, or sexuality. We should be hired based on experience and talent alone. Great people make great games, not a brand, not DEI, not the technology itself, I have a lot more expectations for what Rebel Wolves studio (former CDPR developers) and Archetype Entertainment (former Bioware developers) are doing than anything related to what's left of the brand they left behind.
I didn't get into that because I dond't want the video to be crazy long but you are absolutely right this is about MONEY and nothing else.
Why do all of these UA-camrs care about who works at this or that company or how a company hires people?
'casuse the product tends to suck, we don't really care how it's made when it's good.
@@justaquietpeacefuldancethen why care how a game is made if it's bad?
Real talk this stuff used to not matter at all. LOL
@@SlanderedGaming I get why you stay out of this. It's stupid as hell. Keep up the great work!
So I'm not disagreeing with anything you said but in regards to the rumor around Warhorse poaching talent -- it's not that unreasonable and here's why. CDPR has ballooned in developers and while we as the public see this as a good thing, they had to undergo MASSIVE restructuring to ensure more quality products while still allowing creatives to be creative. The result of this restructuring was Phantom Liberty and now Witcher 4. The former which is great and the next game which will probably be awesome.
That said, restructuring tends to cause a culture shift, which may cause some to leave for newer pastures at a studio like Warhorse.
Now as for them poaching people in droves - I doubt it. But I bet the way the rumor got started is that they got 1-3 devs from CDPR and then someone got into hyperbole about it.
I also want to touch on Bethesda switching to something like Unreal. An engine does not fix structural issues and game design issues. Starfield is a game made by over 400 developers but it feels like it was made by 100. Skyrim, alternatively, is a game made by 100 and feels like 400. Why? The design principles and the people behind it. Bethesda is a studio that works a lot with spontaneity and with the growth they've had, their size does not allow for it.
For BS to succeed, it needs more than an engine - a better internal structure and more ambition in terms of quality than quantity.
Anyways, I loved the video - please keep up the great work :)
I agree Bethesda's issues go beyond just the game engine at this point and absolutely CDPR is experiencing a shift that would explain some talent leaving. Glad you enjoyed the video!
I watch Asmongold's content a lot and recently found your channel for Rogue Trader guides. I tend toward anti-DEI even regardless of being in that bubble, but you gave me a new way to think about it that I appreciate. Really enjoy your videos, and thanks for your perspective SG!
Thank you so much!
Interesting; Asmond would never touch a turn-based CRPG, so how did you get into RT?
There are people who just jump on DEI as a single thing implemented in a single way. They point to race swapping characters, cultural appropriation, and a lot of other things as examples of DEI which has become an analog for CRT. Honestly, every American corporation is bound by laws that enforce compliance, and everyone in the corporate world gets yearly compliance training. This is in my opinion correct. Discrimination is stupid and wrong. Many people have relabeled these initiatives WRONGLY as DEI. Take the CDPR example. on their web page they CLEARLY EMBRACE Diversity and Inclusion. What word is missing? Equity. Why? I can't speak for them, but my feeling is that equity is the word here people have a problem with as it is discriminatory. Ibram X Kendi would tell you it is necessary discrimination and I would disagree. As if you saw what I said earlier, discrimination is stupid and wrong. Replace that E with a better E word like equality, and that should solve the problem, I mean it won't, but it should. Your view on this is dead on in my opinion, as I believe that you do not see the E in DEI as exclusionary and discriminatory, and I don't feel like you think it should be. Equity as it is used in the current parlance should be relegated to the dust bin of history. It implies that equality is not enough, that the people who are underrepresented can't compete given a chance with those they would say are over-represented. That is insulting and demeaning to pretty much everyone. I have worked for fortune 500 companies and a diverse workforce is essential in providing products and services to a global audience. I could ramble on for a long time about what I don't like about the use of so-called equity, but that one part of the term shouldn't detract from the rest of it. And jeeesh people. Don't just make shit up to get clicks or make people angry when they shouldn't be. There is plenty of stupid shit done by everybody these days, lets be fair how we call balls and strikes.
Equity is discrimination is certainly a take.
Lookin' sharp today!
I do what I can!
Is there any recent Endymion-Vid on YT without the word "panic" in it?
TL;DR: Rampant and divisive politicization is bad, good games is good. Also, there are a lot of good indies out there right now, if you are disappointed in AAA, try them.
As far as I know, DEI and ESG, at least originally, are basically scores that help potential investors and governments judge how stable the business is, so it doesn't destroy the environment and engage in malicious hiring practices in favor of short term profit.
The thing with DEI being considered by some harmful and stifling is, in part, informed by the fact that a lot of companies misuse and abuse these practices to reap maximum benefit while expending minimum effort. The situation is not helped by the, frankly, very divisive and inflammatory political discourse nowadays that very much leans into tribalism - you either with us or against us.
I, personally, hold a view that culture resembles a pendulum, something that swings between extremes only briefly reaching equilibrium. It's no secret that a lot of modern day big gaming companies were formed in the 80s and 90s by, generally, small groups of passionate men. When they reached popularity and expanded, they, generally retained that "boys club" culture instead of shifting into more general corpo culture and this had a certain amount of unfortunate side effects, the most egregious and public of them being rampant cases of sexual harassment and general misconduct that only recently came to light.
These companies, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA, CDProject - they are no longer small groups of passionate individuals, they are huge publicly traded companies that are focused on profits and are deathly afraid of those profits being affected by scandals and allegations, and, as such, the pendulum swings in another direction. Now, they are all about diversity, inclusivity and tolerance, only this comes in extreme and often cheap and harmful ways. Case in point, Ubisoft after several mismanaged and mediocre games releases and rampant scandals and lawsuits decided to appease it's shareholders and somewhat fix it's reputation by marketing and making it's upcoming AC Shadows very "DEI-compliant" without really putting any effort in it which resulted in a lot of simply baffling and downright offensive inclusions and a thoughtless tokenization of an otherwise very unique and interesting character of Yasuke.
But this is only on the corpo side of things, there is also a matter of individual artists, who being generally empathetic human beings, encountered this wave of polarizing political discourse and, in their empathy, feeling that unless they make a loud and obvious political statement with their art supporting their side, they will be supporting the other side, which they now see as literal embodiment of evil instead of human beings just with different opinions on stuff. And, of course, there are, as always, opportunists and grifters who "rock the boat" for their own benefit.
Yup and now some people are trying to push the pendulum in the opposite direction.
I personally don't think conflicts like this are worth covering. It's just drama. Just play it if you like it. Whatever happens after the dust settles good games will still exist.
Good games will still exist but they may not be the type of games I love to play. I don't play Halo, COD, Valorant, or any games of those types. Therefore I am more protective of developers who focus on titles that are actually in my lane.
@@SlanderedGaming You made it very interesting by talking about what diversity and inclusion do in a company actually.
I work for small companies so I only had one brush with DEI in which the outsource HR company my boss hired sent a memo about me being the only white guy on the crew and being the crew leader. My boss told them to just make sure payroll was correct. I a not the crew leader because I am white but because I was the one who was willing to be the held responsible in fact of all 10 crews only 3 have white crew leaders. in my case I gathered the "troublemakers" I made a good crew with them because I made a point of not caring what they are but what they could do I treated them has individual people not has a group or a team I gave them a goal to archive and let them do it any way they wanted we quickly figured out who had a talent with the rake who could roll well who could blind side back a truck around a comer I don't care about my crews diverse background I care about their personal abilities and I did not enforce a system on them I let there individuality shine and we do good work
Yup every company doesn't handle DEI properly. Glad to hear they came around and realized you are great at what you do.
This might be a hot take but i really hope the endimyon dude is putting a good front and he doesn't actually believes that he is a crusader against w0kE gaming , cuz he seems to get more extreme and i doubt that it's healthy for him and the ppl around him irl
Yeah I'm new to his content so cannot comment.
A CEO of a big merit driven company feels obliged to come out and denounce a controversial youtuber? Why even react if the 'controversy' is obviosly a false narrative? Afraid for the sales of future games, perhaps? I mean they're created based on merit so what's the issue?
I honestly agree that responding was probably not a good move but I can also understand being tired of people dumping on your damn company all the time. LOL
CDPR sold out once they got listed on the stockmarket in Poland, then it was the move to Canada and embracing ESG. Critcism is getting under their skin now.
Why DEI is needed? How does one justify exclusive mentorship programs?
I would love to see a deep dive video about EA's new love for all things AI . How they treated the people they fired and laid off.
Then, the why current voice actors of Veilgaurd are on strike regarding AI taking over their careers. How much AI was used in the animation of Veilgaurd, the writing???
I honestly didn't know Veilguard VA were on strike. Thanks I'll look into it.
that would expain the quality of writing in this game, it's atrocious.
It's not just The Veilguard though. It's a SAG-AFTRA strike of all voice actors. It's not specific to EA, but industry wide.
@@julilla1 Veilgaurd actors are participating.
@@shellsmith831 of course, they are in SAG-AFTRA. Would you expect them to be scabs?
If you are a smart company, inclusion aint about quotas, it's about creating teams that aren't assholes. Doesn't guarantee it but it sure helps. The whole CDPR story has no foundation, the talent the story is talking about left ages ago, the "new" team created phantom liberty and the 2.0 update so I don't see any grounds for those accusations. CDPR changed its structure and practices years ago when crunch, abuse and all kinds of *isms became apparent and hurt their bottom line via loss of talent. This is OLD. Since then they had much less turnaround and stable employment.
Feels like he was aiming for all the specific talking points these types of people always go for. Being poached by warhorse is likely because Kingdom come deliverance went for the realistic approach due to it being in a historical setting. There was some controversy back near when it came out I think so I wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if people like Endymion see Warhorse as a team that support their beliefs (even though lack of representation in a game doesn't necessarily have anything to do with diversity within the studio).
Really well said. I knew of DEI but your perspective taught me things about it I hadn't even considered.
Thanks I'm glad you enjoyed it!
The moment you mentioned ENDYMIONtv, I knew you were going to show us some baseless, buzzword-laden slander and I was not disappointed. ENDYMIONtv is just another crying-woke UA-cam grifter who probably checks under his bed for Sweet Baby Inc when he goes to bed each night lol.
The other side of this culture war isn't better. Asking for Gamers to be removed, saying that people playing games are bigots and racists, yes, all of them. Mercante wanting to beat people on streets. Using lawsuits to threaten people who speak about her. Rei saying that you should bully developers into their SBI programs.
Like all you need to do, is just look up those people, you don't need some random youtuber to see how insane those folk are. Trying to blam everything on one side, while other is calling for people to get shot, is fucking insane.
Babylon is falling Esau. Best to cleave to the original branches. I doubt you will once you figure who the original branches are.
Damn it's that bad? 😂😂
Thank you for your common sense approach to this. I'm so tired of the whining about "woke DEI".
You and me both!
This is slowly becoming a drama channel I've seen the signs so many times before. I agree with your opinions on DEI btw just not what I subscribed to the channel for.
Drama channel? The only drama I've covered recently is this and Veilguard transferring three choices. Other than that it's all been general gaming news. Don't be sensitive, nothing has changed. :)
@@SlanderedGaming I mean I've watched you since way before the name change and I do think it has changed and I dont feel like I'm being sensitive lol. Im not saying you've become a full on drama channel but you have been covering some drama or made some drama adjacent news videos more and more frequently. You can take a look at your page and see that far fewer videos are positive than they used to be. To be fair it ain't nothing wrong with it objectively you're free to do what you want with your channel I just loved how positive this channel was in a sea of negativity and it's why I subscribed. Best of wishes to you my man I'll keep watching.
I think truth is in the middle . And when companies dont worn for good games but work for politics theb you get a bad game
As the saying goes, there are two sides and then the truth.
Doesn't matter either way.
I got Cyberpunk years down the road after their crapshoot of a launch.
It's very good now. It was not worth it at release at full price.
I no longer place CD Project Red among the 'gold standard'. And that's good. People revered CD Project Red too highly and i suspect it made them overconfident.
I'll remember that launch forever.
And it will impact how long i wait to buy their product.
If i notice it is crappy be it for bugs, political correctness or just atrocious writing i'll skip or wait until it's worth it.
Yup a lot of people's faith in CDPR was badly damaged.
words cant describe my disappointment especially 15:15 then you immediately tried to backtrack it. A shame
I definitely didn't backtrack anything I said. What did you find disappointing?
i had no idea who grumms and enymyion were till today. just sounds like hes throwing his weight around to get attention.
Very possible. LOL
5:43 Ii think everyone cares... it's the director. He was important. Every team needs a leader.
6:22 The unreal engine functionality is way different than the RED engine. The old CDPR devs knew how to use the RED engine and now they're gone... so they moved to the unreal engine for the new employees.
7:59 it doesn't matter how much a game has made the only thing that matters is the skill and merit of the team. Just because the games are different or scale doesn't mean they can't come together and work on a solid game. And they didn't say mass amount went to warhorse they just said poaching.
16:01 so before DEI are you saying gaming devs did not have diversity of thought? And why is DEI bringing up race and gender when we should only think of merit. OK merit and diversity together? How's Concord and Dustborn? They had full reign on those games but where are they?
Every team needs a leader but Director's come and go. I've had periods where our team was led by a different Director literally every year and we all just adjusted. it CAN be indicative of a problem but doesn't automatically mean there is one.
According to CDPR they made the change because it was very expensive to keep the RED engine updated to current standards and it was difficult to get new people up to speed because they had to be trained on how to use the new engine. Therefore the change keeps costs manageable while also widening the scope of what kind of talent can be effective at CDPR.
If it's just one person then it's not poaching. Poaching implies that multiple people are leaving CDPR for Warhorse. The amount each game has made matters because that attracts people to work on the project. People who take pride in their work love working on big games that they feel confident will be well received.
Before DEI, devs who didn't follow a particular culture or train of thought had no vehicle to fight back against harassment and abuse. A great example of this is Tim Cain, the developer who created Fallout & founded Troika Games which went on to create Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. A great deal of his career was spent closeted due to the rampant bias and bigotry he experienced in cultures where he worked. Tim has a UA-cam channel where he has discussed this extensively.
You can't compare the Red Engine with UE5! 🤣
I am pretty sure the cost to train people on how to use RED along with the cost to keep it updated was quite exorbitant. Probably part of what drove them to move towards UE5.
Love your way of explaining diversity. I was part of the diversity ATA project in my own company, the goal was to bring people with different background, to work with regular engineers. I'm working there for five years and I'm helping a lot to bring new ideas and to make space for new people. I truly believe that innovation is driven by bringing different perspectives together.
Me too glad you enjoyed the video!
People who complain about woke have become far more annoying and vocal than woke ever was.
I'm biased on this but yeah I agree. LOL
thank you for your content i apreciate your honest take and perspective which is why i joined your channel thank you for cutting through the bull shit your honesty and experience and perspective is why i trust you as a reliable source on any topic
Dude thank you so much!! I really appreciate that positive feedback.
@@SlanderedGaming yw sir i hope ea signs that contract to protect voice actors and actresses from ai
Despite “the redemption of cyber punk” it never met the promises they made. Only the very first mission has anywhere near the depth to missions like they promised.
No one trusts CDPR anymore.
😂😂
This is nonsense. Stop promoting your own opinion as reality.
Far from "no one" as mad/ disappointed that'll make you. Even if Cyberpunk wasn't a over promised buggy nightmare of a launch I'm not convinced it would've ever lived up to the insane hype some fans were talking about like it was going to be this perfect mixture of Witcher, Deus Ex, GTA and be the best game ever.
Plus as time passes most people stop caring about whatever outrage they had about what x company did, everybody was super mad at Konami for pushing Kojima out of the door and now a decade later eagerly anticipate the MGS remasters. Same will happen when CDPR's next game comes out.
@@SamBrockmann You do know there are features that were promised and showed in trailers, that still aren't in game. You're simply lying.
@@Arnveld , whatever helps you cope, buddy.
This dude here, speaking for "everyone."
It is funny that companies could make great games without dei policies in the past because only with dei you can realisé the full potential of a group…
The companies made great games while many of the minority devs were treated like shit with no recourse to demand better treatment. Tim Cain (Fallout Creator; Troika Games Founder) talks about this extensively on his UA-cam channel while David Gaider has also talked about it on Twitter. DEI allows a new generation of gamers avenues to fight back against harassment and mistreatment while creating incredible games. That's the difference.
DEI will not make a good game bad. But it will make a bad game worse.
It sounds to me like there are bad actors within the DEI framework that prefer to use it as a cudgel against people who dont align with them politically when thats not its intended use. It makes sense why people familiar with it would be confused then to the backlash. As a gamer and consumer, though, i have to be selective. So, if i see a pattern like games with DEI or SBI attached are games that dont interest me or are not fun then, im going to steer away from those games regardless of if DEI is a factor.
Also, not looking at this in a vacuum, the more vocal people who champion DEI tend to say some pretty hateful things in a greater sense. So, i also dont want to support people who think that way. Maybe DEI is a good tool thats being misused but it isnt well represented by its proponents.
Unreal engine is a buzz word at this point most gamers know it and like the options
Its likely the biggest cash cow of epic games, so its constantly updated and improved.
Jumping on unrreal saves valuble time and resources vs updating your on engine that was last used 2->3 years back for a game in a diffetent genre.
You also dont need to pay Bill and Jack your terrible employees who are only around because they built the engine and are on vacation 4/12 months. 😂 takes them 6 months to stress test for the new game.
Unreal is also really Is accessible, so new devs or devs in trainingTest on it all the time
Yup saying that your game is being made in UE automatically perks up people's ears.
@@SlanderedGaming Theres just to many advantages to using it