Indicators are showing that Dragon Age is selling just fine. And it’s not like they get to their planning meeting and ask, “Can we spend some more time on the game design? It’s got real problems,” only to be met with, “No, we’ve got to really focus on diversity this quarter.” They’re not related. While I hardly trust Ubisoft to wow audiences with a cool story, it’s not hard to imagine the related struggles that a foreigner and a woman might have to bond over in that setting.

The Quake games (1 and 2) got updated with co-op support and cross play.

The lead developer of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is in Quebec. And does it not matter that it’s based on a historical figure? Consider also that in California, you’re just more likely to encounter a diverse group of people, so wouldn’t that just be representing the world around them?

Your precise Google Trends inputs are precisely what I took issue with, because they’re a bad sample set for reasons that I pointed out.

If you want to talk about an honest discussion, consider the sample set you plugged into your search. You didn’t go through two years of articles on VGC or GameSpot. You plugged indiscriminate search criteria into an AI. We just had a discussion a few days ago about how mainstream media is not covering major gaming news, but if you’re reading gaming news outlets, it’s been layoffs for the past two years dominating the news. Gaming news outlets would have very little reason to ever use the word “hunger”, for instance, and “transgender” would apply to far more articles than those about fictional characters.

There were more articles covering game character sexuality than the mass lay offs of the last two years that left entire families without sustenance.

No, there absolutely weren’t.

Schreier’s politics come out in his writing as well as social media. The drum he’s been beating for a long time has been about labor and unionizing.

Now you’re not reading what I wrote.

Not just in games, but often times the point of the story’s fake politics is to be a parable for real politics. But that’s also the fun of it, even if you disagree with the story’s intended message.

It’s extremely rare for a delisted game to be removed from your library, and they only do it in cases where, for instance, the game would literally be unplayable because the server isn’t there anymore. Often times they won’t remove the game from your library in that situation either. Having the game in your library is, in fact, enough.

There are multiple things to get out of Elden Ring besides a challenge, and as further proof of that, the DLC retained the challenge but not some of the other fine points I really enjoyed about the base game.

That is engaging with them, just in a way that they’d like to engage with them. From the time they bought the game, it ought to be theirs to do with as they like.

I don’t know how I could have written what I did without reading what you wrote. I think it’s just more of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing. And no positive review would have those words in them, because they’re not qualities that a fan of the game would notice (or even be able to define).

I did read what you wrote. I don’t know how metacritic solves the problem without proof of ownership like Steam has, but there’s a huge disparity between metacritic brigades and people who own the game. Searching for a few of those key words is going to be a quick way to filter for them, generally.

Anyone who wants to know more about what people are responding to in the industry.

What good do a lot of user ratings do anyone if it’s just brigaded by people who haven’t played the game and were told to be upset about it by some influencer who has far more of a political agenda than the thing they’re upset about?

But they don’t have any false expectations of making hundreds of millions of dollars, betting everything they have that it will.

They voted for a handful of them, and then violently voted against the next thousand.

Death Stranding is one of my favorite examples of how many ideas are out there to make games out of without resorting to making a game loop revolve around violence.

It’s quite useful in the one part of the country where the service is good: the Northeast Corridor. It makes traveling by plane downright stupid in a lot of cases. If only more of country’s rail were even that good, which isn’t even a high bar to clear.

I don’t think this game is AAA or that they sunk much money into it. From what I can tell, they just fell $100M short of very optimistic revenue projections based on high initial player numbers.