Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.
It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.
I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.
I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.
Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.
I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.
I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.
Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.
Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.
Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.
I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.
I get the feeling the part of capitalism Phil Spencer hates is the part where consumers can take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the product.
Investors generally want to get a positive ROI. They don’t want to tank the company to the point where it can be acquired by another company for pennies on the dollar.
Look at Nokia. When they hired a former Microsoft exec, they weren’t expecting him to tank the entire company so it could be acquired by Microsoft.
Honestly if you read the actual email I think there could be significant legal trouble ahead.
Spencer talks about how the main barrier to acquiring Nintendo is that they sit on a mountain of cash. He calls that unfortunate. He then proceeded to state a company with connections to Microsoft had just bought a lot of Nintendo shares, and how they could work with said company to make such an acquisition a reality.
The company in question publicly bought a massive amount of Nintendo shares. They then proceeded to pressure Nintendo to invest more capital instead of sitting on the cash pile they have now. They did this under claims that such a move would be beneficial to Nintendo in terms of ROI. However, it would also result in Nintendo being more vulnerable to an acquisition from Microsoft if any of those bets don’t pay off.
In short, it could be argued that Microsoft worked with investors to tank Nintendo so they could buy it. That’s a huge deal and will probably result in a shitstorm.