Why would an "ethical thief" team up with actual murderers and psychos?
The same "suicide squad" that literally blackmailed her father?
You have to understand DEI doesn't just influence the end product in terms of the characters and stories the games tell; it negatively influences the entire design process.
If a company has an HR Department that is DEI standardised, that means that they practice Creative Lysenkoism. If a straight white man on the development team has a good idea or is seen developing their skills toward a more high skill/management position, that tall poppy gets his head cut off. If a brown, a gay, a woman or a cripple is even mediocre in their role, they get elevated above their peers and their suggestions implemented if they're even remotely viable within the development budget. Those promoted beyond their talents develop Imposter Syndrome and paranoia that they'll get outed, so they become commissars for the system that gave them the promotion.
Thus the internal teams of companies are full of utter incompetents, and the fired straight white males who once worked for the companies internally have formed outsourcing companies to supplement the big studios failures. This contributes to the ballooning design costs, and just how ridiculously long every major release's credits roll is.
Its a system of wilfully engineered Creative Kakistocracy. The unlikeable ugly characters and retarded repetitive lefty stories games have are just the tumours that appear on the skin long after the pancreas has gone metastatic.
It's not that complex.
You see this because AAA gaming is so scaled up that they do not have a mechanism for identifying or retaining actual talent or real creatives. It's why so many creatives get to stay in GameDev way past their expiration date (aka Richard Gariott, Romero, Randy Pitchford, the FFXIV 1.0 team, Yoshinori Ono, Ion H over at Blizzard) and why it's such a volatile position to be in. Over the last 20 years - a marked shift has happened in the video game space, where "real creatives" opt to work for your huge corporations and instead set out for themselves.
Think over the last 15 years on some of the generational games released. Minecraft, Undertale, Shovel Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Gone Home (if you're a homo), Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, Stardew Valley, Superhot, FNAF, and so on. A lot of "best games of all time" were created by small independent studios (or one man teams). It represented a gigantic shift in the career trajectories of an above average game dev - no longer was "get a job at Blizz/Acti/Ubisoft" the goal, it was to make your own game and make piles of money. No 15-25 year old wants to be the next Randy Pitchford, they want to be the next Toby Fox.
But AAA studios still exist - so what do you do? What
can you do? Well, trying some shit out. First you saw big studios just making small teams to try and recreate the success of indies - like Square's Tokyo Factory (I am Setsuna), Blizzard's Team 5 (Hearthstone), or Nexon's Mintrocket (Dave the Diver) - which didn't find much success as a concept. This is where you start seeing AAA games generally losing their edge - Assassin's Creed yearly releases that are dogshit, Call of Duty being good once every 3 years, DLC/Lootboxes/Season Passes/etc. The only small team game tied to a big studio that seems to even be considered "Great" is Astro Bot - which is a small studio sequel to
the fucking Playstation 5 pack in free game/demo.
Then you have the idea - we don't need our own creatives; we can just hire consultants. This is where Sweet Baby (and every other grifter) came in from. It's a good sales pitch because it's true "What you've been doing isn't working and we've got a new much more modern approach" and they know it. It's just a scaled up corporate version of a person who does a really good interview but is dogshit at the actual job - except it costs studios huge piles of cash.
You can throw out Sweet Baby (and at this point, most studios are headed that way if they aren't there already) but it doesn't magically fix the gaping hole in AAA development studios that is realistically never going to be fixed. This problem existed at AAA before DEI was a "big thing" - if you have passion, drive, and/or talent in GameDev; the last place you'd ever want to work is a AAA studio - so they don't. The mediocre DEI hires are all the studios have - your "white guy with great skills" just went back to making games in his garage with 1-10 of his friends and family and made $30,000,000 on Steam for it.
If you're thinking "well what do they do next after DEI" - you're actually already here now, in the present day. AAA doesn't have the soul or heart of creatives to make things that are really going to have an impact - so they're just remaking/remastering old games that are already made by better people and re-releasing them.
TL;DR - the entire AAA design process was fucked up beyond any fixing once they moved to a large scale. They were fucked before DEI ever inserted themselves into corporate culture and they're going to be fucked once DEI gets pushed out.
