CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski has issued a strongly worded response to accusations that the studio “is in a lot of trouble right now” because of “diversity hires,” saying the people peddling such nonsense need to “stop looking for conspiracy theories.”
“Seems we live in times where anyone can record complete nonsense and make a story out of it,” Nowakowski said in response to a post on X by YouTuber Endymion, who has a long history of stridently complaining about diversity and “wokeness” in videogames.
“CDPR talent leaving? We have the lowest rotation of people in recent years. DEI-driven recruitment? We hire based on merit and talent alone, just as we make games driven by artistic vision alone. Why did we choose [Unreal Engine]? Because it enables us to work on our games more efficiently and we remain cutting edge tech-wise. The Witcher 3’s director left? Well, yeah, more than 2 years ago… Now, can we stop looking for conspiracy theories and go back to making cool stuff?”
Is it really worth making this kind of statement regarding the DEI thing? The self-proclaimed “anti-woke” crowd wants you to give their bigotry fuel by playing defense. Then they’re going to get on YouTube and upload another shitty rant with a soyface thumbnail and a 3-word headline.
If you can ban them in your spaces then do so by all means. Do not enter their space if you are an honest person. This is a battle won by persuasive rhetoric, not facts and logic.
If nobody plays defense, they blindly assume they’re right about everything. That’s about it. Like children without an adult to tell them off when they act fussy over nothing.
I think the point is they either assume themselves to be right because no one argued, or because everyone who argued is brainwashed woke-zombie.
So if the result is the same, it may be wiser to skip the arguing part ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Depends what your goal is.
If you are trying to change that persons actions specifically, it likely is a lose lose, because they will make more of the same content about the response.
The goal here isnt to actually stop the youtuber from doing anything. The goal is to offer a different firsthand perspective from inside the company, and I think this message does that.
Now anyone that hears about the initial YouTube video, will also hear about the response, and the average person is likely to believe the studios version over a youtuber.
I think saying nothing would distance the company from its fans to some degree, and putting out some PR spin would backfire immediately.
I think that if replies are rare and spot on, it may be a good PR. But do it every time and it will just be a waste of time without any good results
They’ll do that anyway. They engage only in ideological proclamation, not critical analysis. They think truth is dictated by consensus.
You deal with these people by disenfranchising them and removing their opportunities to gain power, not by engaging them directly in debate. Never engage with an echo chamber if you don’t want the ideology of that echo chamber to infect others like a virus.
You have to mock the liars and the strongmen at least sometimes, because if you don’t they flood the zone with their shit and it just consumes the culture.
It’s not even about persuasive rhetoric. The way this seems to work is they’ll blame some real or imagined failure on whatever group they want to abuse, they will claim victory if whatever target does poorly for whatever reason and if they do well they just move on to the next target.
It’s a fortune teller racket. You don’t engage with it, you mock it sometimes to remind people that it’s absurd and you ignore it otherwise.
In the words of the wise : do NOT feed the trolls.
It certainly made me (an actual consumer) like cdpr more so ig it was worth it.
but cyberpunk is punk and also about hyper-individualism, of course there’s gonna be diversity
its a dumb fucking take. Glad to see the CEOs pushback. Unfortunately, the people who follow that asshole arent going to care about the responses.
lol fuck a ceo
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you aint NC legend material to go full borg
Unlike the random full chrome street NPCs in translucent plastic shirts. They’re legendary hookers.
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Seems like the gamergate chuds are trying to make stories happen in a bunch of places.
Ugh, I hate that the actual ethical issues in games journalism got swallowed up by all the other hateful bullshit.
Like, sponsored articles weren’t being disclosed, and some games journalists were being fired for refusing to give favorable reviews to games that were advertising on their site. There were private mailing lists where behind the scenes coordination was happening to push kinder reviews of one member of the list’s friend’s indie game. White jounalists were claiming themselves as mouthpieces for minority gamers who never asked for someone else to speak for them.
Which gave cover for explicit mysogyny and hate… then further got twisted by far-right idealogues like Milo Yannopolous and Breitbart.
Yeah the “they’re ruining the integrity of video game journalism” argument was insane to me. What integrity? Companies routinely paid for good reviews and everyone knew it. It’s a really corrupt industry, but people only got upset because of some shenanigans by women? I think? I never actually looked into what it was about because the whole thing seemed nonsense to me.
Reviews of some indie games were bought, it was asserted, because the games involved just wandering round a location investigating things (i.e. the diary notes in Resident Evil and System Shock) and didn’t even let you collect experience points like a proper masculine game.
This would be a non controversy if they just ignored twitter.
Twitter is just the new Parler.
It’s made much worse by the games “journalists” industry paying too much attention to X. They find some crackpot spouting off controversy, elevate that shit to the moon, and suddenly other people are talking about this opinion that only lives in a vacuum.
IGN, PCGamer, RPS, Kotaku… they all live for this shit.
Right on. The proof is in the pudding even their games I don’t finish, like the gwent one, aren’t bad or not fun, I just lost interest
I used this argument with my friend the other day - cyberpunk lets you play as a trans character, . People got upset when they found that out prelaunch… And then no one cared, the main complaint was bugs
It’s not “go woke and go broke”, it’s “no one wants shit media, and inclusivity is not a substitute for quality”
Inclusivity isn’t the problem, only bigots care if you make something great that happens to be inclusive. It’s observer bias, not correlation - inclusivity is generally good. Gamers don’t mind inclusivity, they’ll get the experience they want and ignore the options they don’t want
The problem is shit writing and gameplay
This is the case, the problem isn’t that there is racial diversity or LGBTQ people, it’s that a lot of AAA games are just horribly made at this point. Unfortunately I’ve seen quite a lot of people who miss that point and just use this as an opportunity to drop bigoted dogwhistles, and talk badly about how “LGBTQ are ruining games”, both being assholes and completely missing the point.
The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it’s not at all a dog whistle for them. It’s very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined
But they hear “go woke go broke” so often that they’ve been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - “yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let’s be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?”
I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion
"You think it’s a bad game because it is, you feel like it’s an attack because they went online and said you’re a bigot for thinking it’s bad, and we’re all biased but you’re self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.
“Now let’s talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you’re sounding just a little more like a leftist each time”
Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds
Yeah there needs to be an effort to look for the problems, unfortunately the guy making fun of games because they suck and calling people “LGTVs” and making fun of queer people for “being woke” isn’t a prime example of that, it’s a prime example of someone pointing out that games are bad and sneaking in his hate of LGBTQ people into the videos.
We need to have an effort to critique and point out the real problems in why games are bad and AAA companies are making bad games, while also pointing out bad, biased, and hateful criticism that pushes a bigoted agenda.
It’s absolutely crazy that the shitlords have won so much influence that companies are literally putting out anti-diversity memos. Holy shit, grow a fucking pair. You have first hand experience that diversity is an important part of creative teams but you are so afraid of some fucking neckbeards that you can’t even stand by these extremely low hanging values which are extremely obvious to anyone who is a productive member of society?
Release an incomplete game, in an unplayable state? Best selling game your studio has ever made. Feel it helps to include perspectives, from a diverse group of people, in your product creation? Beg for forgiveness.
Its so funny that in the indie scene LGBT people are known for making amazingly quality games but somehow in the triple a world they’re ruining them?? Doesn’t compute to me.
Many triple-a games are going to shit, they’re made with the goal of maximizing profits, they aren’t a labor of love and creativity in the way that indie games made by a small team or even a single person are. Of course the people spouting “get woke go broke” either don’t understand this or they don’t care because they have an agenda. So they push the idea that “wokeness” the idea of portraying LGBTQ people in a positive light, or even recognizing them at all, is what is ruining games, and not corporate greed and cutting of corners that AAA companies often do because they think it’ll maximize profits.
It’s so funny that you seem to equate quality indie game with a quality triple a game. I’m really good at golf when I’m playing against friends but put me up against someone making a living playing golf and I’m straight trash. Indie games that are good arent known as indie games, theyre known as the amazing start up that made the triple a sequel to the first game that put insert name of small gaming studio on the map.
Wait- people take Endymion seriously? Since when?
Hundreds of thousands of people do, it seems.
Of course CEO of a public company will deny that it “is in a lot of trouble right now”, regardless of the truth.
Lol oh sweet summer child, the intrinsic value of any publicly traded company’s shares is unscathed by public opinion. Extrinsicly? Idk, maybe if your a meme stock like Tesla or Gamestop. For everything else, I promise there isn’t a single institutional investor or hedge fund manager who will even bat an eye at shit like this. CD Project would need to Kevin Spacy the LGBT game designers to move the needle and do it at a Deshawn Watson rape rate to actually catch any attention from their board members.
