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With BioWare dead, EA lays out its 'next chapter,' and it's pretty much as predicted: Guns and football are fine, and everything else is under the microscope (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Stories might have themes, and those themes might hurt a potential customer's feelings. Much easier (and safer for the stock price) to just not have stories and ideas anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    hurt a potential customer’s feelings

    You meant to say they might hurt the upper management's feelings because of their shitty rightwing politics they carry around like a fragile vase ready to smash and start screaming at someone for forcing them to break it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I've heard stories from people that work on Microsoft games, about how they have whole departments/teams that do things like equity and representation reviews to try and ensure that products are not pushing any potentially offensive stereotype.

    It's a ton of added overhead for anything with a narrative, if your company is big enough to get sued by special interest groups.

    One reason smaller companies can put out interesting indie games, is because they can focus on the gameplay instead of big social/political issues.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Not where I thought that was going. I would think, based on the rest of your comment, that the reason indie games can be more interesting is that they can worry less about potentially being offensive and therefore focus more on social/political issues.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Yeah, so bear sex and any combo of boobs and dicks for characters is a go, and Larian gets awards, and suddenly the indie studio gets huge. I can't imagine bear sex getting the green light in something like a microsoft game. It'd almost definitely get removed by the review, out of concern of getting sued for all kinds of reasons. Larian could take that gamble, and even after winning awards, it isn't such a well known company as to draw the interests of people like predatory lawyers seeking class action settlements for turning kids on to furry futa sex. Even with their win fall, it's not the sort of honeypot for lawsuits as a big corp like MS or EA.

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