Saints Row 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. One of the things that series was known for was character creation and 2 was the craziest of all, it also featured a gender slider. The important thing about that is that it wasn't put in the game to appease anyone, they weren't afraid of "journalists" holding a metaphorical gun to their head, they did it because it was fun and they thought players would enjoy it. That reason makes all the difference because it was the mentality the game was made with and affected everything.

Now let's take this game doing something similar but because "journalists" held a metaphorical gun to their head. Whatever their original plan was got compromised, not because they thought it would make the game better but out of fear of political pressure. What else will change under the radar as a result? Considering how "journalists" drag games through the mud for the messages they didn't have, like far cry 5, what else might be compromised to appease them? Even if nothing else gets changed as a result of political pressure, I still have to consider that I would be justifying that behavior if I bought the game, so as a matter of principle I now cannot. It's a damn shame, but losing their spine means losing a sale.

Do you remember that advertisement with the woman that had a bulge? Yes? Did CDPR really seem to give a fuck about "journalists" or whiny people in general?

I think you are massively overestimating the fear CDPR has over whiny journos. The attitudes of journalists are quite unimportant in this day and age, what matters is really only that they write articles about something to spread public awareness.

Well, take away two textboxes from a menu, use the word "inclusive" in an interview with a rag writer, watch the internet lose its shit. Public awareness created.

Meanwhile, the game would appear to contain enormous amounts of violence, prostitution, drug usage, extreme objectification of people, probably non-trivial amounts of de facto torture, hacking the body parts of other people, and aggressive moral ambiguity. Does any of that sound like something that SJW-aligned journos would really say positive things about?

You think CDPR "caved" to political pressure? I don't think they give a shit about the politics but simply saw a chance for free PR that would cost 15 minutes of work and not have any negative impact on the game. I suspect we will find that early on in the game, we are subjected to choices that will define the gendering of our character quite a bit more than whether we pick masculine body or feminine body. But that is just a guess.

Do you remember when they fired that social media manager guy over stupid things after the SJW pressure? Or the amount of times that they've deleted harmless Twitter jokes and bent the knee to apologise because the perpetually offended complained? I do.

Not to mention that we don't know what else they have changed in the game. For all we know -and with their backpedaling track history- they might have removed that poster, and who knows what else. We'll see once the game releases, but I think that it's understandable that people are wary, because we've seen this stuff way too many times in the past.

Outrage over social media people who aren't meant to create outrage is hardly the same as outrage related to a product that is meant to create it.

I can't imagine that CP77 will be remotely toned down or PC but you're right that we won't actually know until they release the game.

Actually, the social media guy just wanted to make the Twitter account more active and interactive. It only caused an outrage from the perpetually offended, as I said, as everyone else didn't mind the tweets or even found them funny. It's kinda what they're still doing on the Cyberpunk account. Yet you don't see anyone piling on them saying: "Are you ****ing kidding me?! The Amazon and half of Africa are on fire and you do stupid jokes about fires?! How insensitive can one be?!".

We've seen what they've actually done to the game already to appease these people. I quote: "You know, [with Cyberpunk 2077] we really want to make a video game that’s really inclusive". Note how it doesn't say "we want to make a video game that fits the lore better", or "we want to make a video game that gives players more options". It specifically mentions that they want to make it "inclusive" (and I use quotation marks because we know what being "inclusive" truly means nowadays). The issue is not what they have done, but WHY. That's what's worrying people, and why the fact that -as a company- this is not the first time that they do or change something to cater to SJWs matters. Including firing someone over it.

That's why I used that exact example depicting how CDPR has bent the knee in the past. They didn't do this just because of the old saying of "any press is good press". This goes beyond it being a PR move, and if we don't voice our concerns and vote with our wallets (if needed, time will tell), they'll keep going the same route that plenty others have gone before "because it still sells". There's companies, like Gillette or the Ion Fury devs, that have already realised (the hard way) that the SJWs are a very tiny minority of their customers. But that doesn't mean that we don't have to worry anymore, especially when SJWs are still being hired despite their toxic nature (ask Marvel if they've done anything with a certain Twitter bully).

The "GamerGate" pic was actual an in-game thing. The guy properly explained that they took that gif from the game's trailer, and that it was the more mild thing that they found on it to use on a tweet to promote it. Moreover, the date could barely be seen with it in motion, and even some journos admited that fact. It was even internally approved. If ZQ hadn't gone on a crusade with it -as she always does- no one would have bat an eye.

About the hashtag, there's PLENTY of times when you click on or search for a Twitter hashtag and you see it used in like a thousand different topics, and that was the case there. He checked it and didn't see it used just for what the SJWs were using it. That's ESPECIALLY true when you use Twitter outside the main country where the hashtag is being used for X reason, as it tries to find things related to your area first. But we all know that these SJWs think that the world revolves around them, and don't even bother nor care to try to see things from a different perspective. Regardless, CDPR -being polish- should have known that it was absolutely not the guy's fault, and you being from Denmark I'm sure that are aware of this too. It was a non issue, a non offensive tweet, and a stupid situation overall.

In regards to how they interacted internally, they have talked about it in interviews, both sides. I'm surprised that you didn't find it while you were checking it. But basically the guy saw the shitstorm that happened after the stupid hashtag thing, was so nervous that even co-workers went to check on him, got told to work normally by his boss, and later, for some reason, the higher ups talked/changed minds and fired him. They didn't allow him to use the apology that he had written waiting for approval to publish it.

The only people at fault here were the perpetually offended, because they were the ones assuming things and blowing things out of proportion. They didn't own that hashtag, they didn't bother checking the game that the gif came from nor the gift itself in motion, and they didn't even care to do neither of it. And CDPR, instead of standing on the common sense side, tried to appease them. All because they think that these people are a majority, when it has been proven time and again that they aren't, and that they don't buy these products. All they do is force companies to change their behaviour, change their products, and make everyone else unhappy.

And again, as I already stated, this matters because it's the same exact company appeasing these people. No one would have cared if they had justified the change with the other reasons that I stated. But they specifically used "inclusiveness" as their reasoning. It fits perfectly with the previous actions of the company, and disregarding them is a bit naive, to be honest. We don't know what implications the change will have, like for example NPCs being unable to reference our characters properly, or languages other than english -which are more dependent on genders- having narrative issues. And that's just a couple of problems that could arise from that. We don't know if they have changed or will change more things due to that "reason". It's absolutely normal to keep the guard up, all things considered. Sadly, we're way too used to these sort of things.

I keep seeing gamergate being mentioned. I didn't even know about gamergate until well after it had happened, but from what I have read, it was people being upset about games journalists giving good reviews to people they were in a relationship with. Apparently a game dev's ex accused her of that and it spiraled from there. It was also conflated to be about misogyny and sexism in gaming culture.

I tried reading the wikipedia article on it, but it reads like it was written from a biased viewpoint. There is this crap about people being upset because it was text based and not a shooter. Thing is, text based and pick-a-path have been around forever. I bet a lot of you have played Zork.

As for harassment of women that are joining the gaming culture, well yeah, that is to be expected. I say that because I have been a gamer for a long time and as a guy, I have always dealt with harassment or hazing in any new game I start. The thing is, you suck it up or let it roll off your back and work on improving. You don't gripe and complain, or make a big deal out of it, or you get QQ moar plz. and other such things. To this day I suck at FPS and RTS games, but I still play them. If I get called a scrub or something worse, doesn't bother me. These games are competitive and getting in someone's head is a way to get a competitive edge.

The tl;dr is: people pointed out that it isn't ethical for devs to sleep with journalists to get better reviews, after it came to light that Zoe Quinn was doing exactly that while cheating on her bf. Obviously this was the second coming Adolf Hitler, because no feminist identifying as alphabet soup-person should ever be subjected to any kind of criticism or scrutiny.
The whole thing was spun out by mainstream media and feminists as proof of how toxic gamers are and that video games lead to misogyny and should be banned and blablabla.

To make things even more confusing, there is no proper definition for 'gamer gater': nowadays people use it to refer to such toxic video game males who think whoring yourself out for positive press and cheating on your partner is unethical. But back in the day all sides of the debate referred to their opponents as 'the gamer gaters'. This, together with the media bias, makes it almost impossible to read up on any of it anymore.

[deleted]

So what you're really saying is that my summary is accurate and you're not happy with the truth being presented...

If THAT post was your idea of gamergate - then I support gamergate. Because honest work and whoring (which was the thing they acused Zoe Quinn of and which she NEVER managed to deny) cannot be equalized with each other.

[deleted]

"Usually"? Quantify "usually", and elucidate where all these conspiracy theories, hate and threats of violence came from. Because the summary I gave relates accurately, though condensedly, what I saw occur during 'gamer gate'.

On the part of gamers: no conspiracy, no threats of violence, no hate, only criticism of unethical behaviour and displeasure at the censorship of such criticism.
The only examples of hate, violence, threats and conspiracy that I encountered, were on the side of the feminists and the media, both in the form of persecuting gamers and in the form of false flag operations by professional victims.

I cannot say with 100% certainty that nothing like what you say was ever done by any person on the side in favour of ethical behaviour, but your implication that this was widespread, let alone the norm, is a preposterous and conspicuous lie.

[deleted]

Lmao, are you serious? Myrhev already said Wikipedia's article on 'gamer gate' is an incredibly biased pile of crap; I already pointed out that mainstream media coverage was completely fictional, and actively created conspiracy theories, and promoted hate and violence against gamers with morals; and then you use rationalwiki.org as a source? The entire wiki media network is a joke when comes to anything except uncontroversial hard science, and even then it managed to be wrong about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 times... Try harder.