I agree completely. Its completely fucking idiotic, wrongheaded. It shows spite and disrespect to your audience. I also haven't quite understood this trend of 'fuck my audience lol'. Its exceedingly incompetent and is never, ever well written. Almost always done by idiots who think they're better than they are.
I can answer this one, and the reason isn't
quite as insane as you might suspect. It is much more common in other media than it is in gaming, but the reasons and ways it goes down is, fundamentally, similar enough.
It all starts because of a power vaccuum, usually caused by someone dying, retiring, or leaving a given company. More rarely, it can happen due to outside agitation. Regardless of the origins of the vaccuum, an opportunistic shithead gets into a position of authority, either through veterancy at the company, ties to its corporate culture, or simply being friends with the right people. Either way, they've landed into a position of authority, except with one critical failing: They fundamentally do not understand the property they've been put in charge of, and more critically,
don't care that they don't understand about the property. They care only that the property has a landed audience and that this audience means that their personal message can reach as big a non-voluntary crowd as it possibly can.
It is effectively a chance for them to virtue signal loud enough that no one can ignore it. This is the
only part of this they care about. Towards that end, when works created by these clowns succeed, it is in
spite of the pandering, not because of it, and usually the result of vastly more talented people within the machine, who will never get the credit they deserve. They freely will then appoint staffers not based on competence or experience, but on how much they will kiss ass and uphold the party line, so the team quickly gets bogged down with loons who don't understand how to do their jobs.
The fact that the fans are not the woke Twitter crowd who will blindly lap up every bit of Autism thrown their way and declare it the most groundbreaking thing ever is why they hate the fanbase. The fanbase is not willing to cheer on the virtue signal, and ergo, is lower than shit in their eyes, unable to see the brilliance of the message. Needless to say companies with a branch dominated by this sort of idiocy bleed fan goodwill dry in short order and will bitch endlessly about fan entitlement over the fans complaining about them fucking up the property. After all, to these people, narrative is all that matters, and if you won't conform, you are dead to them.
If it's bad for fans, it's barely livable for those at the company who don't believe in this political autism. The regime is fierce about dirving off or oppressing any viewpoint that even tangentially differs from them, effectively acting in real life as they do on Twitter. Surprising exactly no one, this does nothing to help the work environment and leads to a bleed of talent, as quality staffers are either driven off or willingly leave. While sometimes you can get the rare rolled double six that knows good design
and is a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive, most in the time those are mutually exclusive because of their all-consuming need for affirmation. Most chillingly, if the choice comes between the massive virtue signal and crashing the company with no survivors,
the virtue signal will win every single time. They don't care about the work being profitable, they care about broadcasting to the maximum number of people, and literally nothing else.
The interesting part is that normally, it's not the corporate level maintaining this shit; corporations often move at a glacial pace internally unless they're particularly efficient, they are often very slow to react, especially if the company is particularly large. Very often, the company this shit is happening at has no idea what's actually going on behind closed doors until shit goes thermonuclear. It's only at this point that corporate will get involved to get control of shit, but it very well may be too late. Moreover, the branches pulling this shit at a given company often go to extravagant degrees to cover up their activities, so often the first clue that shit's going wrong is when the company eats a major publicity gaffe or an even more major economic loss. By this point even if it's caught early, corporate may be in no position to mitigate it; they pumped resources and time into a project that they either can release and see some profit from or put it into stasis or start from scratch on. Either way, the corporation is too late and ill-equipped to do anything but mitigate the loss as best it can.
Whether you're talking about Disney-Lucasfilm, Bioware, the BBC, Naughty Dog, or Marvel, you're looking at the exact same pattern, playing out in the exact same way. The good news is that over time, this shit will crush and break itself as people like this keep plowing their careers off the proverbial precipice in their perennial need to show everyone how woke they are.
