Then gaming got popular, and people didn't know what customers wanted. First the PS2 sold well because it played Blu-ray and everyone wanted something to watch their Adam Sandler flicks on and maybe play Ridge Racer occasionally. Then the Wii had a ballistic sales trajectory, and the gaming market changed forever. Along with the advent of smartphones, "casual" gaming became the norm and less masculine obsessive titles got funded. For the first time perhaps in the history of gaming, you can make more money targeting a more inclusive audience from the start. This was confirmed by a number of breakout indie successes that showed you can substitute a ridiculous budget for a concise story with broad appeal (eg. Undertale or Five Nights at Freddy's).
Of course, men look at this and just want Quake 5 and Fallout 78. I empathize with that perspective, but I know a lot of people who also feel like "non-woke" games suck now too. Unless your game is so blatantly offensive that it crosses into parody again (eg. Wolvenstein or C&C Red Alert), you can't really make a non-woke game nowadays without looking like a moron. Even that hyper-masculine DOOM reboot is tonally incapable of coming to terms with a silent protagonist that has the charisma of a sack of flour.
You are wrong on all levels with this statement.
Firstly, males are ~50% of the world population, that's a hell of a large market to sell to. And secondly, you can also make separate games specifically for girls as the target market to get the other ~50%, you don't have to feminize or water down traditionally male games/franchises hoping they'll appeal to women because it never works like that.
Top Gun Maverick was a hit because it was mostly geared towards male fantasies and that's fine. The Barbie movie was a hit because it was movie targeted specifically to women and that's fine. Imagine they'd make the Barbie movie all about Ken in order to appeal to men as well. Who would watch that? Nobody. Well, that's exactly what modern game dev, story telling and writing is doing today, and then wondering why it's failing. Trying to make an entertainment product to appeal to absolutely everyone is doomed to fail from the start.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made specifically for one gender or the other, because they're biologically different and therefore have different fantasies, and gaming is a lot about living personal fantasies and escapism from reality, not about having narratives you don't empathize with, shoved down your throat.
>Along with the advent of smartphones, "casual" gaming became the norm and less masculine obsessive titles got funded. For the first time perhaps in the history of gaming, you can make more money targeting a more inclusive audience from the start.
And that's good, but that's because of creation of new gaming genres like Farmville, Candy Crush or Flappy bird, that have mass appeal, not by modifying established "male dominated" franchises to give them mass appeal.
>I empathize with that perspective
You may empathize with it but you clearly don't understand it nor does a large part of the modern industry it seems. Or they understand it but reject it because in their mind women >= men at everything, therefore they must be forced to enjoy the same entertainment. Refusing to acknowledge that men and women are different and into different things (aka "wokification") is what's killing modern entertainment.
>Unless your game is so blatantly offensive that it crosses into parody again (eg. Wolvenstein or C&C Red Alert)
What was blatantly offensive about such games?
>you can't really make a non-woke game nowadays without looking like a moron
Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
I didn't watch the video. I watched the gaming landscape evolve over the past 20 years and I personally witnessed which games succeeded and which did not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
The only bestseller on that list that predates the Wii with a female protagonist is Pokemon. The reason? Before the Wii, the entire market for games was masculine individuals. It was pandered to in it's entirety because it was not perceived that women used or wanted to use consoles and computers. The advent of the Wii (and moreover, the smartphone) radically upset that assumption. The market literally changed, and the approach businesses took changed along with it. Borderlands went from being a slapstick must-play to a goiter-sized shame pimple on the aging face of gaming overnight. There really are hundreds of such series that never stuck the landing when the market changed. To name a few, Quake, Spec Ops, Deus Ex, Need for Speed, Outrun, Tom Clancy, Star Fox, F-Zero, Oddworld, Crysis, Skate/Tony Hawk, Saints Row, Postal, XCOM, Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam, Red Faction, Unreal Tournament and Conkers Bad Fur Day all didn't survive. Meanwhile, Animal Crossing, Fortnite, Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, and Among Us are more popular than ever. Touhou outlasted Space Invaders - what does that tell you business-wise?
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made officially for one gender or the other
Not between us consumers, but for businesses there absolutely is; it makes less money. Why make a big-budget Barbie movie that men will be disgusted by when you can shit out another Star Wars film that couples and families will rush out to watch? The reason we don't see more Barbie like movies is that people don't think feminist mass appeal is enough to get significant audiences out the door, and they're absolutely right. People want Avatar, people want Jurassic Park. Horror flicks do well too. Anything that doesn't divide people along critical lines is much more profitable and has greater potential for mass-appeal. Top Gun is a funny pull since it's a movie that was only funded after the Navy realized it was a propaganda piece. As an indie script it went nowhere.
Look - I don't want my favorite series to go woke. But that ship sailed when Kojima left Konami, and the case is probably the same for your favorite series as long as it's owned by private capital and shareholders. I'm just telling it how it is, because you and I both know games are going down the shitter but we apparently disagree on what the motive is.
> Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
Quite famously, Warhammer is both a blatantly moronic series and a demonstrably woke one as well. Unless "non-woke" simply means "violent" to you, then I'm not sure what you mean here. Warhammer as a series is against imperialism, pro-diversity, pro-LGBT, is apologetic to communism, creates fictional races of bug-people to squash and mostly just ends up pitting different queers against each other in frilly painted outfits. Fitting that it's a series descendant of model-painting tabletop pansies. Eric Cartman says it best: "We're playing 40k, dude!" https://youtu.be/rIo7UYVwcAU
Black Myth Wukong is a poor man's pittance of a soulslike, and it'll be lucky if people mention it in the same breath as Lords of the Fallen. It pulled punches (much in the same way Warhammer as a franchise does) because it's a mass-market game that can't make subversive statements without pissing off the Chinese market. If you think both of these are tentpole "non-woke" games to you, then I have to admit that woke gamers are getting much better content than us masculine men are. At least they can tolerate Elden Ring without accusing it of being historically inaccurate for putting women in armor and making men hug one another.
Oh, and since you made it this far here's a blackpill; queer and diverse voices are destined to succeed in gaming because the entire market is hyper-saturated with manly titles that nobody wants to play. Even utterly dogshit games like Fortnite attain mass appeal by ditching the Call of Duty desaturated look and pitting Snoop Dogg against a dude in a bannana costume. Undertale charmed 10s of millions of gamers with a cat that needed money to pay for college. Non-manly games are a gold mine, and if the success of mobile gaming is any indication it's a vein that goes quite deep. It's not that men are inferior as an audience, it's that they've been pandered to for too long with little ROI. It makes no business sense trying to chase this shrinking audience, especially if it means more Cyberpunk 2077-like releases that just waste everyone's time and money.
That's the opposite of what's happening right now.
>another Star Wars film that couples and families will rush out to watch?
Nobody rushes out for Star Wars content anymore. Disney already burned all the bridges with the fanbase on that by wokefiying it to death.
> queer and diverse voices are destined to succeed in gaming
What does "diverse" mean for you here?
For one, only about 5% of the population is queer. I'm not sure how that's gonna help with success with targeting such a small market.
And secondly, the queer people I know have already been playing games for the past 20 years, they don't need dedicated queer games.